A similar fate befalls Andrew Saxon, the adversary of ‘Miss Cornelius’, which many consider Harvey’s finest story. The enigmatic Miss Cornelius, after being accused of faking a poltergeist, apparently bewitches Saxon’s wife, though it is suggested that this may be a paranoid delusion of Saxon’s. Eventually he takes his wife to a mental home, only to discover that he himself is about to be certified.
The narrator of ‘The Tool’, which originally appeared in the second New Decameron anthology in 1920, also writes from inside a lunatic asylum.
The Beast with Five Fingers was dedicated by Harvey to his wife, and his third collection, Moods and Tenses, was dedicated to his father-in-law John Henderson. The introduction (‘The Double Eye’) states that the eighteen stories in Moods and Tenses were written by his friend Dan Hartigan, an artist from New Zealand, who had a distinctly weird left eye. The stories can be divided into ‘left-eye’ and ‘right-eye’ stories, and it is up to the reader to decide which is which. One of the uncanny (‘left-eye’) tales is ‘Mrs Ormerod’, which concerns the third of Harvey’s triumvirate of sinister enigmatic women. She is a dominating housekeeper who seems to exploit the altruistic couple employing her. Again the reader is left to guess whether the character is a spiritual vampire, or whether the narrator is misinterpreting the actual situation. Her supernatural power is debatable and (like Miss Avenal’s) has recognisable equivalents in the everyday world.
In ‘The Follower’, an author invents a plot describing a scholar who acquires some unusual palimpsests (connected with diabolism?) in Asia Minor and returns to England with a mysterious monk who is his ‘constant companion and follower’. These two ‘fictional’ characters actually live half a mile away, across the valley, and the author is warned by them (supernaturally) to abandon his book.
This tale has slight overtones of M.R. James, as does ‘The Dabblers’. Here a secret tradition or game, descended from a variation of the black mass, survives the generations at a public school—successive groups of five schoolboys sing at midnight on the same date every year, sacrifice a chicken, but are never caught. Like the majority of the stories in Moods and Tenses, the tale is extremely well-handled, but lacking in actual supernatural content.
Athelstan Digby, hero of Harvey’s first novel in 1920, returned to feature in a very entertaining crime novel, The Mysterious Mr Badman (1934). Describing the quest for a rare John Bunyan volume stolen from a secondhand bookshop, this story has nice antiquarian touches and excellent atmosphere. Harvey also collected some of his essays and articles in Quaker Byways, published by the Friends’ Book Centre in 1929.
A complete change came over Harvey’s writing in his last two-and-a-half years, spent tranquilly with his wife and two children —Mark Henderson and Sarah Grace—at Letchworth in Hertfordshire. His preoccupation with the uncanny, macabre and evil seemed to end abruptly. As Charles Fryer observes in his monograph, there were no more ‘incursions into the shadows . . . his last three books are bright and cheerful; he is now in the world not of ghosts but of children . . . My guess is that, facing the prospect of an early death and believing that death would bring about the renewal of his personal being, he found in the interests and imaginative play of children a foreshadowing of that renewal’.
Probably originating in bedtime stories invented and recited to young Mark and Sarah, Harvey’s last books were—in addition to his happy childhood reminiscences, We Were Seven—the juvenile novels Caprimulgus (1936) and Mr Murray and the Boococks (1938), which both describe the light-hearted adventures of three children, seemingly in a setting very like the family home and garden at Letchworth. Caprimulgus was marketed as a book for children ‘from 12 to 80’.
Local historian Reginald Hine, a close friend who regularly visited the ailing Harvey (now often confined to bed), wrote in his foreword to Mr Murray and the Boococks ‘of the fascination of his conversation, of his ability to range astonishingly widely over the fields of literature, and of his unfettered, curious and critical spirit, which viewed life sub specie aeternitatis et absurditatis.’
After prolonged convalescence at a sanatorium in Munderley, Norfolk, Harvey returned home, where he died on 4th June 1937. Besides his obituary in The Times (7th June), Harvey received many tributes in other newspapers and Quaker magazines.
Almost ten years after Harvey’s death, his fame increased with the almost simultaneous release of Robert Florey’s Hollywood movie The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), starring Peter Lorre and Victor Francen, and a selection of Harvey’s twenty best stories, edited by Maurice Richardson (and issued with a special ‘book of the film’ wraparound band).
The success of this book (Midnight Tales in Britain; The Beast with Five Fingers in the United States, not to be confused with the earlier edition with this title) led to the publication in 1951 of a new collection of unpublished tales written by Harvey in the early 1930s, The Arm of Mrs Egan. The first twelve stories are inter-related, being told by Nurse Margaret Wilkie, who has witnessed or taken part in some peculiar happenings in the course of her professional life.
‘The Arm of Mrs Egan’ suggests the writer’s favourite device, the long arm of coincidence. When Mrs Egan’s young son dies, she blames (and curses?) the bungling Dr Gilbert Lennox, who is dogged by bad luck from that moment wherever he goes. He continually gives wrong diagnoses, and the victims are always linked in some way with the name Egan. Another of Harvey’s eccentric women, in ‘The Flying Out of Mrs Barnard Hollis’, is an elderly widow who seems to have the power of liberating her astral body, plus an evil component. She takes a drug to induce the special psychic state and is evidently a white witch.
‘Account Rendered’ is a genuinely supernatural tale involving a mysterious figure engaged in psychological research into the relation of space-time and the unconscious. He needs to be anaesthetised by a doctor on the same date every year, to postpone death. A strange old man fleetingly appears every time this is done—a ghost looking for his murderer.
One of the four stories in The Arm of Mrs Egan not related by Nurse Wilkie, ‘The Habeas Corpus Club’, is a humorous fantasy. Peregrine Pollock is a prolific writer of crime stories and an insomniac. The spirits of all the corpses summarily dismissed in the early chapters of his books are all members of the Habeas Corpus Club. They leave the premises of the club only at night. ‘We go to haunt the authors who murdered us,’ say the members. ‘Do you wonder that Peregrine Pollock hardly ever sleeps?’ Harvey’s sardonic wit is well in evidence here, and the publishing company in the tale glories in the name of Rape and Carnage!
***
It is usually difficult to distinguish the real situations from the complex disintegrating minds of Harvey’s characters. Feverish moods and the unclear nature of personal relationships are the essential elements of his world. From the obsessive to the whimsical, William Fryer Harvey remains an excellent craftsman throughout the entire corpus of his engaging, sardonic and enigmatic fantasies. Thirty-two of his strange and bizarre tales (exactly half of the total that appeared in his four collections) are here gathered to intrigue and mystify a new generation of readers and connoisseurs of bizarre fiction.
1. Charles Fryer: A Friend with a Difference—William Fryer Harvey, 1885-1937 (York: privately printed by William Sessions at the Ebor Press, May 1981)
2. William Fryer Harvey: We Were Seven (London: Constable, 1936)
MIDNIGHT HOUSE
I HAD often seen the name on the ordnance map, and had as often wondered what sort of a house it was.
If I had had the placing, it should have been among pine woods in some deep, waterless valley, or else in the Fens by a sluggish tidal river, with aspens whispering in a garden half choked by poisonous evergreens.
I might have placed it in a cathedral city, in a sunless alley overlooking the narrow strip of graveyard of a church no longer used; a house so surrounded by steeple and belfry that every sleeper in it would wake at midnight, aroused by the clamorous insistence of the chimes.
> But the Midnight House of cold reality, that I had found by chance on the map when planning a walking tour that never came into being, was none of these. I saw no more than an inn on an old coaching road that crossed the moors as straight as an arrow, keeping to the hill-tops, so that I guessed it to be Roman.
Men have a certain way of living in accordance with their name that one often looks for in vain with places. The Pogsons will never produce a poet, whatever may be the fame they may achieve as lawyers, journalists, or sanitary engineers; but Monkton-in-the-Forest, through which I passed last week, is a railway junction and nothing more, in the middle of a bare plain; not a stone remains of the once famous priory that gave to the place its name.
I expected then to be disappointed, but for some reason or other I made a resolve, if ever chance should leave me within twenty miles of the inn, to spend a night in Midnight House.
I could not have chosen a better day. It was late in November and warm—too warm I had found for the last five-mile tramp across the heather. I had seen no one since noon, when a keeper on the distant skyline had tried in vain to make me understand that I was trespassing; and now at dusk I stood again on the high road with Midnight House below me in the hollow.
It would be hard to picture a more desolate scene—bare hills rising on every side to the dull, lead sky above; at one’s feet heather, burnt black after last spring’s firing, broken in places by patches of vivid emerald that marked the bogs.
The building of stone, roofed with heavy, lichen-covered flags, formed three sides of a square, the centre of which was evidently used as a farm-yard.
Nowhere was there sign of life; half the windows were shuttered, and, though the dim light of afternoon was fast waning, I saw no lamp in the tap-room, by the door which overlooked the road.
I knocked, but no one answered; and, growing impatient at the delay, walked round to the back of the house, only to be greeted by the savage barking of a collie, that tugged frantically at the chain which fastened it to the empty barrel that served it as kennel. The noise was at any rate sufficient to bring out the woman of the house, who listened stolidly to my request for a night’s lodging, and then to my surprise refused me.
They were busy, she said, and had no time to look after visitors. I was not prepared for this. I knew that there were beds at the inn; it was used at least once a year by the men who rented the shooting, and I had not the slightest inclination for another ten-mile tramp along roads I did not know. A drop of rain on my cheek clenched the matter; grudgingly the woman saw reason in my arguments and finally consented to take me in. She showed me into the dining-room, lit the fire, and left me with the welcome news that the ham and eggs would be ready in half an hour’s time.
The room in which I found myself was of some size, panelled half-way up to the ceiling, though the natural beauty of the wood had been recently spoiled by a coat of drab-coloured paint.
The windows were, as usual, firmly shut; and from the musty smell I gathered that it was little used. Half a dozen sporting prints hung on the walls; over the mantelpiece was a cheap German engraving representing the death of Isaac; on the sideboard were two glass cases, containing a heron and two pied blackbirds, both atrociously stuffed; while above that piece of hideous Victorian furniture, two highly coloured portraits of the Duke and Duchess of York gazed smilingly upon the patriarch.
Altogether the room was not a cheerful one, and I was relieved to find a copy of East Lynne lying on the horsehair sofa. Most inns contain the book; the fourteen chapters which I have read represent as many evenings spent alone in wayside hostelries.
Just before six the woman came in to lay the table. From my chair in the shadow by the fireside I watched her unobserved. She moved slowly; the simplest action was performed with a strange deliberation, as if her mind, half bent upon something else, found novelty in what before was commonplace. The expression of her face gave no clue to her thoughts. I saw only that her features were strong and hard.
As soon as the meal was upon the table she left the room, without having exchanged a word; and feeling unusually lonely, I sat down to make the best of the ham and eggs and the fifteenth chapter of East Lynne.
The food was good enough, better than I had expected; but for some reason or other my spirits were no lighter when, the table having been cleared, I drew up my chair to the fire and filled my pipe.
‘If this house is not already haunted,’ I said to myself, ‘it is certainly time it were so,’ and I began to pass in review a whole procession of ghosts without finding one that seemed really suited to the place.
At half-past nine, and the hour was none too soon, the woman reappeared with a candle, and intimated gruffly that she would show me my room. She stopped opposite a door at the end of a corridor to the left of the stair head. ‘You had better wedge the windows, if you want to sleep with them open; people complain a deal about their rattling.’ I thanked her and bade her goodnight.
I was spared at least the horror of a four-poster, though the crimson-canopied erection, which occupied at least a quarter of the room, seemed at first sight to be little better. There was no wardrobe, but in its place a door, papered over with the same material as the walls and, at first sight, indistinguishable from them, opened into a closet, empty save for a row of hooks and lighted by a single window.
I noticed that neither of the doors had keys, and that a red velvet bell-pull by the bed was no longer fastened to its wire, but hung useless from a nail driven into one of the beams of the ceiling.
I am in the habit of securely bolting my door whenever I spend a night away from home, a piece of common prudence which nothing less than an awful fright from a sleep-walker taught me twenty years ago.
To do so was on this occasion impossible, but I dragged a heavy chest across the door which led into the passage, placing the water-jug against the inner one, in case the wind should blow it open in the night: then, after wedging the window with my pocket-knife, I got into bed, but not to sleep. Twice I heard the clock outside strike the hour, twice the half-hour, yet, late as it was, the house seemed still awake. Distant footsteps echoed down the stone passages; once I caught the crash of broken crockery—never the sound of a voice. At length I fell asleep, with the same feeling of unaccountable depression that had dogged me since sundown still upon me.
I had in truth walked far too far that day to receive the inestimable boon of the weary, a dim consciousness of annihilation. Instead I tramped again over dream moors with a Baedeker in my hand, trying in vain to find the valley of the shadow.
I came at last to a mountain tarn, filled with brown peat water; on the marge a huge ferry-boat was drawn up, on which crowds of men, women, and children were embarking. The boat at last was full and we were putting off, the heavy sails filling before a wind which never ruffled the surface of the water, when someone cried that there was still another to come, pointing as he spoke to an old man who stood on the shore madly gesticulating. An argument followed, some in the boat saying that it was too late to put back, others that the man would perish with cold if we left him there on the shelterless moor. But we were too eager to see the valley of the shadow, and the steersman held on his course. As we left him, a sudden change came across the old man’s features; the mask of benevolence vanished; we saw only a face of such utter malignancy that the children in fright ran whimpering to their mothers.
In the boat they whispered his name, how that he was a man forever seeking to gain entrance to the ferry, that he might accomplish some awful purpose, and in joy at our escape a strange song was raised, which rose and fell like the music of a running stream.
I was awakened by the sound of rain upon the window; the water in the brook outside had already risen and was making itself heard, but with a sound so soothingly monotonous that I was soon asleep again.
Again I dreamed. This time I was a citizen of a great leaguered city. The once fertile plain that stretched from the walls to the dim horizon lay ravaged by the arm
ies that had swept over it. The sun was sinking as a crowd of half starved wretches came to the western gate, clamouring to come in. They were the peasants, caught between the besieging hosts and the frowning barriers of the city that had no food for mouths other than its own. As I stood at the postern to the right of the main gate with a little knot of companions, a man approached who at once attracted our attention. He was a huge fellow, in the prime of life, straight as a tree, and strong enough to carry an ox. He came up to our leader and asked to be let in. ‘I have travelled day and night for twelve months,’ he said, ‘that I might fight by your side.’ The last sally had cost us dear and we were short of men such as he. ‘Come in and welcome,’ said the captain of the guard at last. He had already taken a key from his breast and was unlocking the postern, when I cried out. Something in the man’s face I had recognised; it was that of the old man who had tried to get into the ferry. ‘He’s a spy!’ I shouted. ‘Lock the gates, for God’s sake! Shut the window, or he’ll climb in!’
I jumped out of bed with my own words ringing in my ears. Some window at any rate required shutting; it was the one in the cupboard opening out of my room. Wind had come with the rain and the sash had been loosened. The air was no longer close and the clouds were lifting, scudding over the moon. I craned out my neck, drinking in the cool night air. As I did so, I noticed an oblong patch of light on the roadway; it came from an upper window at the opposite end of the building; now and then the patch was crossed by a shadow. The people of the inn kept strangely late hours.
I did not at once go back to bed, but, stiff and sore, drew up a chair to the window with pillows and a couple of blankets, and there I sat for fully half an hour, listening to the howling of the dog, a wail of utter weariness far too dismal for the moon alone to have awakened. Then it suddenly turned into an angry growl, and I caught the sound of distant hoofs upon the road. At the same time the shadow reappeared upon the blind, the window was pulled up, and the hard, sour face of my landlady peered out into the darkness.
The Double Eye Page 2