The Terrible Old Man1
The first story by HPL explicitly set in New England, in the invented town of Kingsport, the tale combines certain Dunsanian elements (for example, robberies gone wrong) with hints of magic and mythology. Although it is the shortest of any of Lovecraft’s significant stories, the figure of the Terrible Old Man is powerful and reappears in later work. It also unsubtly expresses Lovecraft’s twisted desire for the ethnic cleansing of New England.
It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva2 to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house in Water Street near the sea,3 and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.
The inhabitants of Kingsport4 say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man which generally keep him safe from the attentions of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and venerable abode. He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships5 in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys who love to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to break the small-paned windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are other things which frighten the older and more curious folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in through the dusty panes. These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer. Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions,6 and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.
The Pirate’s Hideout, 116 Front Street, Marblehead, Massachusetts, 2017. In his H. P. Lovecraft Companion, Philip A. Shreffler proposes that this building was Lovecraft’s inspiration for the home of “The Terrible Old Man.” However, Lovecraft wasn’t familiar with Marblehead at the time he wrote the story.
Photograph courtesy of Donovan K. Loucks
Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr. Ricci and Mr. Silva were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek waited for them and their presumable metallic burden with a covered motor-car in Ship Street, by the gate in the tall rear wall of their host’s grounds. Desire to avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.
As prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent any evil-minded suspicions afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water Street by the old man’s front gate, and although they did not like the way the moon shone down7 upon the painted stones through the budding branches of the gnarled trees, they had more important things to think about than mere idle superstition. They feared it might be unpleasant work making the Terrible Old Man loquacious concerning his hoarded gold and silver, for aged sea-captains are notably stubborn and perverse. Still, he was very old and very feeble, and there were two visitors. Messrs. Ricci and Silva were experienced in the art of making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak and exceptionally venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one lighted window and heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with pendulums. Then they donned masks and knocked politely at the weather-stained oaken door.
Waiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered motor-car by the Terrible Old Man’s back gate in Ship Street. He was more than ordinarily tender-hearted, and he did not like the hideous screams he had heard in the ancient house just after the hour appointed for the deed. Had he not told his colleagues to be as gentle as possible with the pathetic old sea-captain? Very nervously he watched that narrow oaken gate in the high and ivy-clad stone wall. Frequently he consulted his watch, and wondered at the delay. Had the old man died before revealing where his treasure was hidden, and had a thorough search become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not like to wait so long in the dark in such a place. Then he sensed a soft tread or tapping on the walk inside the gate, heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow, heavy door swing inward. And in the pallid glow of the single dim street-lamp he strained his eyes to see what his colleagues had brought out of that sinister house which loomed so close behind. But when he looked, he did not see what he had expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that man’s eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.8
Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble one’s reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.9
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1. Written in early 1920, the story first appeared in The Tryout 7, no. 4 (July 1921), 10–14. It was reprinted in Weird Tales 8, no. 2 (August 1926), 191–92.
2. Note that the names are Italian, Polish, and Portuguese, respectively.
3. “Locating whatever might have been Lovecraft’s model for the Terrible Old Man’s House in Marblehead [Kingsport], however, presents a problem,” writes Philip A. Shreffler, in The H. P. Lovecraft Companion (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1977).
There is indeed a Water Street in Marblehead, and it is “near the sea” (and the Boston Yacht Club!). But actually Water Street is nothing more than a dead-end circle at the end of Front Street, which runs along the Marblehead harbor; Water Street itself is only about 150 feet long and has on it only one house, which is not particularly evocative. . . . However, if we can assume . . . that Lovecraft applied the name of one street to its own extension, then Front Street becomes transformed into the fictional Water Street. And this theory seems particularly attractive because of one small single-room building about halfway down Front Street. Nestled sideways into the hillside incongruously among the large Federal houses of the area is the Pirate’s Hideout, which is also variously known as the fisherman’s shack and the cordwainer’s shop. . . . Several legends surround this tiny hut, which stands just back from what is locally called Oakum Bay. Some say that pirate treasure was exchanged for goods there, while another tale maintains that on certain nights a person standing near the Pirate’s Hideout may hear, borne on the east wind, the terrified screams of a woman murdered by pirates and buried in the lower marshes. . . . Although there are only a couple of gnarled trees near the Pirate’s Hideout, and no curiously painted stones at all, there is the maritime connection and legends macabre enough to make the place stick in Lovecraft’s imagination. (97–98)
It should be noted that this is all probably wishful thinking at best; HPL did not visit Marblehead until 1922.
4. A fictional seaport of New England, about which more is revealed in “The Festival,” written in October 1923. All that can be discerned here is that it is a “little town” on the coast of the Atlantic, containing the probably roughly parallel Ship Street and Water Street (probably roughly parallel because the property of the Terrible Old Man had its front gate on Water Street and its back gate on Ship Street). Water Street is described below as “near the sea.” In 1931, HPL expressly stated that Kingsport was a disguised version of Marblehead, Massachusetts (see “The Picture in the House,” in the previous volume, pp. 35–44, note 7), but there are similarities to Salem as well (see “The Festival,” pp. 103–13, note 11, in the same volume).
5. The “clipper ships” were square-rigged wooden (and, after the 1860s, sometimes iron ore) sailing ships, with three or more masts and a length five times their width. The East India Company, known colloquially as the John Company, traded between England, India, and China and, operating nearly as a nation unto itself, maintained an army and printed and used a proprietary currency. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, one of the principal commodities exported from India (mainly from Rangpur, in Bengal Province) to China by the British was opium, used as payment for highly sought-after goods (including silk, tea, and porcelain) from China then brought to the West. Widespread addiction to opium forced a ban on its importation, whereupon the East India Company subcontracted distribution to private shipowners who operated in the so-called country trade (purchasing the drug at auctions in Kolkata and Mumbai). These country traders then sold to Chinese smugglers plying the waters of the South China Sea and the Shiziyang (the upper channel of the Pearl River estuary), from whom they received payment in silver and gold. “The Chinese coast from Macao to Chusan is now the constant cruising ground of twenty opium ships. The waters of Canton are converted into one grand rendezvous for more than thirty opium boats,” reported the Chinese Repository, a Protestant missionary periodical, in 1838. Five years later, the Rev. W. M. Lowrie, en route to Amoy, recorded in his diary that the three main “opium depots” were at Tongshan (or Tongsan) Harbor, in Howtowshan (How-tow-shan) Bay, and on Namoa Island. See Zheng Yangwen, The Social Life of Opium in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105.
6. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the area around Providence industrialized, the immigrant population changed from largely English, Irish, German, and Swedish to eastern European, southern European, and Mediterranean.
7. The moon was in its third quarter on April 11, 1920; however, on April 11, 1919, the previous year, the moon was nearing fullness (the full moon was April 15). But April 11, 1920, was a Sunday night, an appealing day for the criminals to carry out their attack because the streets would not be busy; April 11 was a Friday in 1919.
8. Donald R. Burleson, in “‘The Terrible Old Man’: A Deconstruction,” Lovecraft Studies 15 (Fall 1987), 65–68, suggests that the man here represents a god reborn. Carl Buchanan explores this and the mythic foundations of the story in detail in “‘The Terrible Old Man’: A Myth of the Devouring Father,” Lovecraft Studies 15 (Fall 1987), 19–31.
9. Peter Cannon writes, “Altogether the Terrible Old Man, however much Lovecraft meant the reader to sympathize with the ‘victim’ of the tale rather than the thieves, comes off as an unpleasant creature, not really human” (“Lovecraft’s Old Men,” Nyctalops 3, no. 2 [March 1981], 13).