by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)
6. glebe: piece of land.
7. Law’s Memorials: Memorials: or the Memorial Things That Fell Out Within the Island of Britain, Nov 1638 to 1684 (first published in 1818) is a work by a Presbyterian clergyman, Robert Law (d. c.1686), with much emphasis on the supernatural, the demonic and the apparition of spectres. The Introduction by Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781–1851) to the first edition of that work provides a definitive history of Scottish witchcraft.
8. Accuser of the Brethren: a reference to Revelations 12: 10: ‘And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.’ The Hebrew word ‘Satan’ can mean either ‘adversary’ or ‘accuser’.
9. grogram: a coarse material made from silk, mohair and wool (from the French gros grain, ‘coarse grain’).
10. change-house at Knockdow… Kilmackerlie: a change-house was an inn, where travellers could rest and change their horses. While Kilmackerlie is a fictional place, Knockdow is a real Scottish town, in the western lowlands of Scotland, near the Isle of Bute and Greenock, in the Firth of Clyde.
MARGARET OLIPHANT
The Open Door
Margaret Oliphant (née Wilson, 1828–98) was born at Wallyford, Midlothian, and spent her childhood there and at Lasswade, Glasgow, Everton and Birkenhead. This peripatetic upbringing was the result of her father’s haphazard career as a clerk. Margaret was educated by her mother, also named Margaret Oliphant. Launched on a career as a novelist, in 1852, young Margaret Wilson married her cousin Francis Oliphant, a painter and a designer of stained glass. Within five years of the wedding, she had endured the descent into alcoholism of her brother, and the deaths of one of her five children, her beloved mother and her husband. Although her literary career was highly successful, she often struggled financially. She was a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, a sympathetic biographer and a talented novelist – as well as a prolific one, producing nearly one hundred novels (including several that she gave to her brother to be published under his name). She was a Christian writer, with a taste for mysticism, and a shrewd analyst of family relationships. Her supernatural fiction represents some of the finest work she did, and some of the best stories in the genre are hers: A Beleaguered City (1879) is a profoundly moving short novel, and, among her short stories, ‘The Land of Darkness’, ‘The Lady’s Walk’ and ‘The Open Door’ are outstanding. M. R. James thought her the master of the ‘religious ghost story’ and remarked of ‘The Open Door’ that it was one of the very few ghost stories ‘wherein the elements of beauty and pity dominate terror’; ‘there are moments of horror; but… we end by saying with Hamlet: “Alas, poor ghost!” ’ (from his article ‘Ghosts – Treat Them Gently!’ in the Evening News, 17 April 1931).
‘The Open Door’ was first published in book form in Two Stories of the Seen and Unseen, the other story being ‘Old Lady Mary’ (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1885), pp. 3–84. This supplies the copy-text used here. The story had first appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 131 (January 1882), pp. 1–30, just missing the traditional Christmas publication. Oliphant was a frequent contributor of stories, essays and reviews to Blackwood’s. For explanations of the dialect words used in the story, please see the Glossary of Scots Words.
1. Brentwood: a fictional village, but in her edition of Oliphant’s stories, A Beleaguered City and Other Tales of the Seen and the Unseen (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), Jenni Calder suggests that it is modelled on Lasswade, a village on the River North Esk, about nine miles south of the centre of Edinburgh, where Oliphant had lived for a time during her childhood.
2. Simla: the summer capital of the British Raj, a place for colonial bureaucrats and their families to escape from the heat of the plains. Now called Shimla, the town lies in the north-west Himalayas, in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
3. no little Eton at Fettes: Eton College is one of the oldest and most prestigious English public schools. With money left by Sir William Fettes (1750 – 1836), the independent school Fettes College, at Comely Bank, Edinburgh, in the town’s northern suburbs, was opened in 1870. This dates the story as occurring before that year.
4. Pentland Hills and the Firth: a range of hills to the south and south-west of Edinburgh; the Firth of Forth is the estuary of the River Forth. The land in between is the old county of Midlothian, with the Pentland Hills running down its western side, and the city of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth directly north.
5. the Castle and the Calton Hill… Arthur’s Seat: Edinburgh Castle dominates the city from the height of Castle Rock; Calton Hill lies in the centre of Edinburgh, to the east of the New Town, with the Dugald Stewart Monument, Nelson’s Monument and the National Monument to the dead of the Napoleonic wars, all then prominently visible; Arthur’s Seat is the highest peak in a group of hills in Holyrood Park, a wild and unbuilt-on place right in the centre of the city.
6. grimy with paper-making: in the nineteenth century, industrial paper mills were common along the River North Esk.
7. accidenté: uneven or broken ground (French).
8. ‘the offices’: see note 4 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’.
9. In this transitory life… Prayer-book… going to happen: the ‘Prayer-book’ is the Book of Common Prayer; the passage may be referring generally to passages such as these words of the burial service: ‘in the midst of life we are in death.’ However, it is more likely that the narrator quotes directly the words of the prayer of intercession at the communion service: ‘And we most humbly beseech thee of thy goodness, O Lord, to comfort and succour all them, who in this transitory life are in trouble, sorrow, need, sickness, or any other adversity.’
10. brougham: a closed, horse-drawn carriage, originally with two wheels but usually, by the end of the nineteenth century, with four.
11. refracted sound: the deflection, or bending, of sound waves as they enter a medium where their speed is changed; refraction in particular can bend sound waves downwards, contributing to and thereby amplifying the overall sound heard by the listener.
12. phonetic disturbance: a disturbance of speech but here referring to an auditory disturbance.
13. mediums: see note 9 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’.
14. fine as Burns… in no kirk: the writings of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96) are marked by their compassion towards those who rarely receive it. Therefore this comment could allude to a number of poems, but, given the context, most likely it refers to the last stanza of ‘Address to the Devil’ (1786), in which the poet expresses the hope that the Devil himself might be saved if he could only feel sympathy for human beings.
15. the ‘Children’s Record’: there are a number of periodicals with similar titles, but the most likely to be meant here is The Children’s Record of the Free Church of Scotland, a pious mid-Victorian publication, still appearing in the 1860s.
16. ventriloquism: the art of throwing one’s voice so that it sounds as though it originates in another person or object; though the word (derived from Latin and meaning ‘to speak from the stomach’) dates from the late eighteenth century, the practice dates back to (at least as far as) the ancient Greeks, who called it gastromancy (from gaster, ‘belly’, and manteia, ‘prophecy’) and used it for divination in the belief that noises of the stomach were the voices of the dead and could be interpreted by the gastromancer to foretell the future. In the nineteenth century, spurious ghosts were often found to be faked using ventriloquism.
17. apostolical benediction: the blessing given by the priest at the conclusion of a service.
18. prodigal: a reference to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, in Luke 15: 11–32.
RUDYARD KIPLING
At the End of the Passage
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)) was born in Bombay. He left for England in 1871, where he was educated, and then in 1882 retu
rned to India. Here he worked as a journalist and writer, achieving literary fame young. In 1889, he returned to London and three years later married an American, Carrie Balestier. They lived together first in Vermont, USA, and then in England, eventually settling in Sussex. Kipling is one of the greatest short-story writers in the English language, a memorable poet, and a writer of some marvellous children’s books. His works include: The Jungle Book (1894), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Stalky and Co. (1899), Kim (1901), Just So Stories (1902), Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), Rewards and Fairies (1910) and his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937). Kipling wrote a number of excellent supernatural and uncanny tales, most notably ‘The Mark of the Beast’ (collected, along with ‘At the End of the Passage’, in Life’s Handicap – see below) and ‘They’ (collected in Traffics and Discoveries, 1904). The following notes draw in part upon the Kipling Society’s notes to the tale prepared by John McGivering and Dr Gillian Sheehan, and available online at www.kipling.org.uk.
The copy-text of ‘At the End of the Passage’ is based on its first book publication in Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891), pp. 159–84. The story first appeared in the USA in the Boston Herald (20 July 1890) and in the United Kingdom in Lippincott’s Magazine (August 1890).
1. The sky is lead… Himalayan: the opening poem is by Kipling.
2. ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’: Kipling quotes the words of the American Declaration of Independence (1776).
3. punkah: a large swinging fan, suspended from the ceiling and operated manually, in this case by an unnamed servant, also known as a ‘punkah-wallah’ or ‘punkah-coolie’ (for coolies, see note 6 below).
4. apoplexy: a seizure caused by an obstruction in or bursting of an artery, cutting off the supply of blood to the brain and leading to a loss of consciousness or the inability to move or speak.
5. Gaudhari State line: a fictional place, but perhaps based on the district of Ajmere-Merwara, which lies 250 miles south-west of Delhi.
6. Indian Survey… coolies: the Indian Survey was a government agency responsible for the mapping of India. The term ‘coolie’ – possibly derived from the Tamil word kli, meaning ‘to hire’ – was used by European colonists to refer to a native hired worker.
7. Pilsener: a pale lager, originally from Pilzen in the Czech Republic. The OED records the earliest instances of its use in English as dating from the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
8. bumblepuppy: originally a form of the game bagatelle played outdoors, it became an expression used for ‘whist played unscientifically’ (OED).
9. Gazette of India: a newspaper published by the imperial government used for making official announcements.
10. drag: a four-horse coach.
11. King’s Peg… Heidsieck: King’s Peg is a mixture of brandy and champagne; Heidsieck is a brand of champagne.
12. Rao of Jubela: ‘rao’ is a title given to an Indian chief or prince; Jubela is a fictional Indian state.
13. Pathan: a Pashto-speaking inhabitant of the region where, at the time of this story, Afghanistan and India met.
14. Chlorodyne, opium pill… nitre, bricks to the feet… burning-ghat: Spurstow describes the usual course of cholera and its treatment: the drug cholorodyne, composed of chloroform, morphia and prussic acid, was used in the second half of the nineteenth century to induce sleep and to stop diarrhoea; opium would also act as a sedative and also apparently prevent diarrhoea; nitre means, in this instance, potassium nitrate, used as a diuretic; bricks were applied to the feet to warm the patient’s extremities; a ‘burning-ghat’ is a funeral pyre, a place by a riverside where Hindus cremate their dead.
15. Graphic: a British illustrated magazine – edited at the time of Kipling’s story by Edwin Locker – that printed pictures, articles and fiction. The Graphic serialized the work of some distinguished writers, including, in 1891, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).
16. Chucks: the would-be genteel boatswain in the novel Peter Simple (1834) by Captain Frederick Marryat (1792–1848).
17. babu: originally a Hindu term of respect, equivalent to ‘mister’, the word was in time applied by British colonists in a derogatory way to a Hindu, or especially Bengali, clerk who supposedly spoke an overly ornate, florid and mangled English.
18. Job: a reference to the central character in the Book of Job from the Bible; a good man condemned to extreme and unwarranted suffering.
19. gold mohur on the rub: the mohur was at that time the Indian coin with the highest value; a ‘rub’ is a rubber or series of card games.
20. ‘Grasshopper’s Polka’ … prestissimo: for polka, see note 13 to ‘The Cold Embrace’; this particular polka was composed by Ernest Bucalossi (1859–1933). The term prestissimo is a musical direction meaning ‘very quickly’.
21. ‘Glory to thee … Or powers of darkness me molest’: the text is a slightly misquoted version of the ‘Evening Hymn’ by Bishop Thomas Ken (1637–1711).
22. cockchafer: a large flying beetle, also known as a maybug, common in England and elsewhere in Europe.
23. Well done, David!: a reference to I Samuel 16: 23: ‘And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.’
24. the blessed Jorrocks… I sleeps: Jorrocks is the Cockney grocer and Master of Foxhounds in novels by Robert Smith Surtees (1805–64). The quote is a reference to Chapter 7 of Handley Cross (1843): ‘where the M. F. H. [Master of Foxhounds] dines he sleeps, and where the M. F. H. sleeps he breakfasts.’
25. heat-apoplexy: a late nineteenth-century medical term for sun-stroke (for apoplexy, see note 4 above).
26. spiking your guns: rendering guns unusable, originally by forcing a spike into the touch-hole (the aperture in the breech of a gun through which the charge is ignited). This was a practice employed by artillery crews to prevent their weapons being used by the enemy in the event of their being captured. Applied metaphorically, the phrase means to frustrate someone’s plans or stop someone doing something.
27. twelve-bore rifle, an express, and a revolver: a twelve-bore gun would be a large shotgun, firing a bullet weighing just over an ounce (about 40g); an Express is a quick-firing hunting rifle; a revolver is a pistol in which the bullets are contained in a revolving cylinder.
28. nipples … lever: attached to the breech, or back of the gun behind the bore, the nipple is a small, perforated piece of metal on which the percussion cap ignites; the lever is the part of a gun by which the barrel of a breech-loader opens.
29. doll-head bolt: a doll’s head in a rifle (not usually in a revolver – see note 27 above) is ‘a top extension fitting into the mortice in the top of the standing-breech’ (OED).
30. rowelled: to ‘rowel’ is to press the spiked star-shaped wheel at the extremity of a spur against the flesh (usually of a horse), on occasion (and certainly here) breaking the skin; in his novel The Light That Failed (1891), Kipling writes: ‘He was rummaging through his new campaign-kit and rowelling his hands with the spurs.’
31. A blind face: an allusion to stanza 7 of Kipling’s poem ‘La Nuit Blanche’ (a French expression meaning a ‘sleepless night’), a poem which first appeared under the title ‘Natural Phenomena’ in the Civil and Military Gazette (7 June 1887):
Then a Face came, blind and weeping,
And It couldn’t wipe its eyes
And It muttered I was keeping
Back the moonlight from the skies;
So I patted it for pity,
But it whistled shrill with wrath,
And a huge black Devil City
Poured its peoples on my path.
32. the Rains: the Monsoon season of heavy rains following the heat of April and May, typically beginning in early June.
33. Simla: see note 2 to ‘The Open Door’.
34. My gre
at Scott!: an exclamation of astonishment, supposed originally to refer to the popular American general Winfield Scott (1786–1866), a national hero in the USA after his successful campaign in the Mexican – American War (1846–8).
35. Sahib: a term of respect used by Indians when addressing a British colonist or European; the word originally derives from the Arabic for ‘friend’.
36. Kodak camera: the brand name for this well-known make of camera was coined by the American George Eastman (1854–1932) and registered as a trademark in 1888. Eastman Dry Plate Company (from 1892, the Eastman Kodak Company) produced the first cameras manufactured for non-expert use; very soon the word ‘Kodak’ became synonymous with ‘camera’.
37. ‘There may be Heaven … We-ell?’: the last two lines of ‘Time’s Revenges’, a poem by Robert Browning (1812–89) first collected in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics (1845), seventh volume in the series ‘Bells and Pomegranates’. Kipling has slightly (and in the case of the last word very likely deliberately) misquoted: ‘There may be heaven; there must be hell; / Meantime, there is our earth here – well!’
LAFCADIO HEARN
Nightmare-Touch
Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was a journalist, translator, and writer of stories. His life was incorrigibly Bohemian, endlessly adventurous. Born of an Irish father and Greek mother in the Ionian Islands, he moved to Dublin at the age of six. Educated in Yorkshire, he slipped off, as soon as he could, for Paris. From there, he went to America, roughed it in New York and finally went to pick up a small annuity in Cincinnati. He established his career in journalism through a taste for the macabre and dangerous (his first notable article was the detailed description of a half-burnt murder victim). After some years in disreputable New Orleans, he wrote books of reportage on a tidal wave in the Gulf of Mississippi and on life in the West Indies. The messiness of his life makes an odd contrast with the polished precision of his writing. In 1890, he finally found his true subject when he went to Japan, initially as a newspaper correspondent. He stayed there for the rest of his life, marrying a Japanese woman from a Samurai family, having four children, becoming a Japanese citizen (with the name Koizumi Yakumo) and holding down a job as Chair of English Literature at Tokyo University. A number of his Japanese stories have supernatural themes; before he left for Japan, he had already published a volume of Chinese ghost stories. ‘Nightmare-Touch’ occupies a mysterious ground, somewhere between essay, memoir and short story.