Pierre Dupin (Leon Waycoff) tempts a fearful Camille with a glimpse into their future, as co-stars Bert Roach and Edna Marion are jostled by the crowd.


or any of the screenwriters were familiar with it. Since the story originally appeared in the pages of WEIRD TALES in the early 1920s, under the title “The White Ape,” this is not at all impossible. Lovecraft’s story (later collected in THE LURK-


ING FEAR) begins with the ominous sentences: “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background be- hind what we know of it peer demoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ulti- mate exterminator of our human species—if sepa- rate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.”


Anthony Pearsall offers a thorough summary of the story in his book THE LOVECRAFT LEXICON (New Falcon Press, 2005): “According to the nar- rator, Arthur Jermyn was so peculiar-looking that many people with his facial features would have


24


wanted to die; but he has a sweet soul. He is a poet, a dreamer, a scholar, and a First Class Hon- ors graduate—the highest possible rank—of Ox- ford University. He is the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and ‘a music-hall singer of unknown origin.’ (Mu- sic halls were popular forms of working-class en- tertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries, featuring a variety of less-than-great singers war- bling typically sentimental, comical, or patriotic songs in front of large audiences, on a variety- show bill interspersed with comedians, acrobats, magicians, and so forth. A gentleman’s marriage to a music-hall singer in the late Victorian era would have been a social scandal.)


“After her husband deserted the family, the mother raised her son at Jermyn House, the fam- ily seat, although their circumstances were not especially wealthy. In 1911, Sir Arthur makes an expedition to the Belgian Congo (now simply “Congo”), among the Onga and Kaliri tribes. He meets Mwanu, an elderly Kaliri, and hears some significant stories about a lost city and its inhabit- ants. In 1912, he finds the remains of the lost city

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