An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Unfortunately, Ermengarde fails to take Algernon’s wallet, so she has no money when she reaches the city. She spends a week on park benches and in bread-lines; she tries to look up Jack Manly, but cannot find him. One day she finds a purse; finding that it has not much money in it, she decides to return it to its owner, a Mrs. Van Itty. This aristocrat, amazed at the honesty of the “forlorn waif,” takes Ermengarde under her wing. Later Mrs. Van Itty hires a new chauffeur, and Ermengarde is startled to find that it is Algernon! “He had survived—this much was almost immediately evident.” It turns out that he had married the woman who wrote the love letter, but that she had deserted him and run off with the milkman. Humbled, Algernon asks Ermengarde’s forgiveness. Ermengarde, now ensconced as a replacement for the daughter Mrs. Van Itty lost many years ago, returns to the old farmstead and is about to buy off the mortgage from Hardman when Jack suddenly returns, bringing a wife, “the fair Bridget Goldstein,” in tow. All this time Mrs. Van Itty, sitting in the car, eyes Ermengarde’s mother Hannah and finally shrieks: “You—you—Hannah Smith— I know you now! Twenty-eight years ago you were my baby Maude’s nurse and stole her from the cradle!!” Then she realizes that Ermengarde is in fact her long-lost daughter. But Ermengarde is now doing some pondering: “How could she get away with the sixteen-year-old stuff if she had been stolen twenty-eight years ago?” She, knowing of the gold on the Stubbses’ farm, repudiates Mrs. Van Itty and compels ‘Squire Hardman to foreclose on the mortgage and marry her lest she prosecute him for last year’s kidnapping. “And the poor dub did.”

This is the only work of fiction by HPL that cannot be dated with precision. The manuscript is written on stationery from the Edwin E.Phillips Refrigeration Company, which was a going concern around 1910 or so, but since the story alludes to the passage of the 18th Amendment it must clearly date to 1919 or later. Since Phillips (HPL’s uncle) died on November 14, 1918, perhaps the stationery came into HPL’s possession shortly thereafter; but it is by no means certain that he wrote the story at that time.

Of possible relevance is a P.S. to HPL’s letter in the Argosyfor March 1914: “I have a design of writing a novel for the entertainment of those readers who complain that they cannot secure enough of Fred Jackson’s work. It is to be entitled: ‘The Primal Passion, or The Heart of ’Rastus Washington.’” It is possible that Jackson is a subsidiary (or even primary) target for attack here. Several of Jackson’s novels have exactly the sort of implausibility of plot and sentimentality of action that is parodied in “Sweet Ermengarde.” With “A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson” and “Ibid,” it forms a trilogy of HPL’s comic gems.

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Page 259

Sylvester, Margaret (b. 1918),

correspondent of HPL (1934–37). She had written to HPL in care of WT,asking him to explain the origin and meaning of the term Walpurgisnacht . She later married and became Margaret Ronan, writing the preface to a school edition of HPL’s tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror(Scholastic Books, 1971).

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Page 260

T

Talman, Wilfred Blanch (1904–1986),