The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories
Page 51
27. sixpence … shilling: a shilling consisted of twelve pence. The Colonel is surprised into being more generous than he at first intended.
28. railway-rug: a blanket or rug for keeping railway passengers warm. Parkins has after all been travelling by train in December.
29. delirium tremens: see note 27 to ‘Green Tea’.
30. surplice: a loose gown of white linen worn by clerics and choristers during church services; the garment was frowned on by some Puritans, Evangelicals and Low Church Christians, and serves perhaps, therefore, as a vague reminder of the Colonel’s distaste for High Church paraphernalia.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Moonlit Road
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842–1914?) was an American journalist and short-story writer. He was born in a log cabin in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio, and fought in the American Civil War on the side of the Union, rising to the rank of major in the cavalry. With the end of the war in 1865, Bierce moved to San Francisco where he soon established himself, with Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller, as a leading member of a new Western literary elite. Following his marriage to Mary Day, he moved to England, where he lived from 1872 to 1876. His failure to achieve there the level of success he had enjoyed in California prompted his return to the USA. He was a brilliant journalist, who nevertheless rather looked down on the profession. Bierce was an infamously mordant and cynical writer: his nickname was ‘Bitter Bierce’. A disillusioned irony informs his best work; he himself thought of it, in fun, as devilish: Satan was his supposed collaborator on The Fiend’s Delight (1872). His other most notable works are: the macabre and dark short stories contained in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891); The Monk and the Hangman’s Daughter (1892), a full-length romance translated from German; a collection of uncanny tales, Can Such Things Be? (1893 – see below); and The Cynic’s Word Book (1906), republished as The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), a compendium of sourly sarcastic definitions. The date and manner of Bierce’s death remains unknown, as, in 1913, motivated by weariness with his own life, he departed for Mexico, in the middle of its own civil war, where he vanished, very likely finding the ‘euthanasia’ or happy death that he sought there.
The copy-text of ‘The Moonlit Road’ derives from Can Such Things Be?, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Company, 1910), pp. 62–80. An earlier version of Can Such Things Be? had appeared in 1893, as a book of twenty-five tales, containing such classics as ‘The Death of Halpin Frayser’ and ‘ “The Isle of Pines” ’. When the book was reissued in the Collected Works, a number of stories were cut, and many more, including ‘The Moonlit Road’ (which had first appeared in an edition of Cosmopolitan in January 1907), added. The Collected Works were published in twelve volumes between 1909 and 1912, and as an economic venture were a failure, apparently helping to bankrupt the publishers.
1. Yale: with Harvard and William and Mary, one of the three oldest universities in the USA; founded in the 1640s and located, far from Nashville, in the north-east of the United States at New Haven, Connecticut.
2. Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every wound: in Genesis 37: 25, when Joseph’s brothers conspire against him, they sell him to Ishmaelites ‘bearing spicery and balm and myrrh’ from Gilead (the mountainous region east of the River Jordan). Proverbially this balm, a resinous gum, also known as ‘balsam of Mecca’, has powerful healing properties: ‘Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?’ (Jeremiah 8: 22); ‘Go up into Gilead, and take balm, O virgin, the daughter of Egypt: in vain shalt thou use many medicines; for thou shalt not be cured’ (Jeremiah 46: 11). The African-American spiritual ‘There is a Balm in Gilead’ talks of the balm (taking it as a form of the redemption offered by Jesus) as something that will make the wounded whole. The balm is also referred to in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ (1845) – ‘Is there – is there balm in Gilead? – tell me – tell me, I implore’ (line 89) – and in Chapter 12 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
3. katydids: small green insects of the family Tettigonniidae, related to the cricket. The sound produced by the males of the genus Pterophylla (‘winged leaf’) is supposed to resemble the reiterated phrase ‘Katy did, Katy didn’t’.
4. Caspar Grattan: it might be that the name ‘Caspar’ is an allusion to Caspar Hauser (died 1833), a young man discovered wandering in Nuremburg in 1828, after having been supposedly kept in a locked room in solitary confinement for the first eighteen years of his life. ‘Caspar Grattan’s’ sense of disassociation regarding his identity, and the feeling that he has entered life as a full-grown adult may be meant to evoke Caspar Hauser’s predicament. The Hauser story was again current in the 1890s following the publication of Elizabeth Evans’s The Story of Kaspar Hauser from Authentic Records (1892), the Duchess of Cleveland’s The True Story of Kaspar Hauser from Official Documents (1893) and Andrew Lang’s The True Story Book (1893). ‘Grattan’ might suggest reference to a number of Irish writers and politicians.
5. potter’s field: place of burial for unknown or indigent people.
6. Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow: the opening line of the poem The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society (1764) by Oliver Goldsmith (1730? – 74).
7. via dolorosa: ‘way of sorrow’ (Latin); the route supposed to have been taken by Jesus Christ as he went from Pilate’s judgement hall to Calvary, the place of crucifixion.
8. ‘the captain of my soul’: this quotes the last line of a poem, ‘Invictus’ (‘Unconquered’ in Latin), by William Ernest Henley (1849–1903): ‘I am the master of my fate: / I am captain of my soul.’
9. the medium Bayrolles: this character turns up in another story by Bierce, ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ (collected, along with ‘The Moonlit Road’, in Can Such Things Be?, 1910). In a footnote at its close, this tale is revealed as having been communicated by the spirit Hoseib Alar Robardin to the medium Bayrolles. The story went on to influence Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) in his creation of the ‘Cthullu Mythos’, a fictional cycle in which inhabitants of modern New England glimpse or come into contact with the remnants of an ancient and malevolent civilization. Bayrolles might be a pun on the French word paroles, meaning ‘words’ (see also the Introduction, pp. xxxi–xxxiii). For medium, see note 9 to ‘The Haunted and the Haunters’.
10. Valley of the Shadow: an allusion to Psalm 23: 4: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’
HENRY JAMES
The Jolly Corner
Henry James (1843–1916) was born in New York and educated there, as well as in London, Paris, Geneva and Harvard. From 1875, after two long prior visits to Europe, he became an expatriate, living for a year in Paris, for over twenty years in London, and from 1898 in Rye, in Sussex. He also spent significant periods of his life in Italy. He was naturalized as a British subject in 1915. Henry James devoted his life to literature. He was (in his own words) an ‘unsaleable’ author, and yet also one of the most significant novelists, critics and short-story writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among his greatest novels are The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Wings of the Dove (1902). His many volumes of short stories include: The Lesson of the Master (1892), The Real Thing (1893), Terminations (1895), The Soft Side (1900) and The Better Sort (1903). James wrote some of the finest ever ghost stories, most notably his classic short novel The Turn of the Screw (first serialized in Collier’s Weekly, 1898, and published in book form in The Two Magics that same year).
‘The Jolly Corner’ was first published in the first number of the English Review (December 1908). It was placed in very distinguished company, between a poem by Thomas Hardy (‘A Sunday Morning Tragedy’) and a short memoir (‘Some Reminiscences’) by Joseph Conrad. The copy-text used here is based on its first book publication in The Altar of the Dead, The
Beast in the Jungle, The Birthplace and Other Tales, vol. 17 of the New York Edition (London: Macmillan and Co., 1909), pp. 435–85. ‘The Jolly Corner’ is the ninth of ten tales, coming directly after a sequence of other classic stories of the supernatural: ‘Owen Wingrave’, ‘The Friends of the Friends’, ‘Sir Edmund Orme’ and ‘The Real Right Thing’.
1. Irving Place: a Manhattan street, running from East 14th Street northwards to Gramercy Park, east of Union Square and Park Avenue South.
2. the inventor of the sky-scraper: the first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building in Chicago (constructed 1884–5), was designed by William Le Baron Jenney (1832–1907). He used a load-bearing steel frame to carry the weight of the building. The term ‘sky-scraper’ had been in use since the late eighteenth century to mean the uppermost sail in a sailing ship; over the next hundred years, the phrase was adopted for high-standing horses, tall men, tall hats, high-hit balls in baseball games, and tall stories. In his book The American Scene (London: Chapman & Hall, 1907), written on a return journey to the USA undertaken from August 1904 to July 1905, James had written (on p. 77) with fascination and dismay about what then seemed the specifically American phenomenon of the skyscraper:
Crowned not only with no history, but with no credible possibility of time for history, and consecrated by no uses save the commercial at any cost, they are simply the most piercing notes in that concert of the expensively provisional into which your supreme sense of New York resolves itself. They never begin to speak to you, in the manner of the builded majesties of the world as we have heretofore known such – towers or temples or fortresses or palaces – with the authority of things of permanence or even of things of long duration. One story is good only till another is told, and sky-scrapers are the last word of economic ingenuity only till another word be written.
He was speaking particularly of the area south of 23rd Street, which is precisely the locale of Spencer Brydon’s New York.
3. Mrs Muldoon’s broomstick: as her accent later makes clear, Mrs Muldoon is Irish. Following the large-scale emigration from Ireland to America from the 1840s onwards, precipitated in great part by the Irish Famine, the Irish housekeeper and female servant was a cliché of New York life and a staple figure in later nineteenth-and early twentieth-century literature.
4. pour deux sous: for two cents (French), or, in former French currency, ten centimes; in other words, a small amount.
5. worshipped strange gods: a biblical echo; see, for example: ‘And they forsook the Lord God of their fathers, which brought them out of Egypt, and followed other gods, of the gods of the people that were round about them, and bowed themselves unto them, and provoked the Lord to anger’ (Judges 2: 12); ‘They provoked him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations provoked they him to anger. They sacrificed unto devils, not to God; to gods whom they knew not, to new gods that came newly up, whom your fathers feared not’ (Deuteronomy 32: 16–17).
6. ombres chinoises: a shadow-puppet show (French – literally, ‘Chinese shadows’).
7. rapprochement: a connection or comparison (French).
8. Pantaloon… Christmas farce… Harlequin: Pantaloon and Harlequin are both stock figures from the Italian commedia dell’arte. Pantaloon was traditionally an elderly figure of authority, the guardian, or elderly suitor, of the beautiful heroine (Columbine) and mocked by the Clown. Harlequin is himself clown-like, a rival for the affections of Columbine; being mute, he relies on dumbshow. The Christmas farce refers to the English harlequinade, a form of pantomime.
9. the trodden worm of the adage: ‘the smallest worm will turn, being trodden on’; most likely this adage originated in William Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part Three, II. ii. 17.
10. pince-nez: a pair of glasses that perch on the nose, unattached to the ears (French).
MARY AUSTIN
The Readjustment
Mary Austin (née Hunter, 1868–1934) was born in Carlinville, Illinois. After graduating from Blackburn University, she moved with her family to California. In 1891, she married Stafford Wallace Austin. The couple lived in the Owens River Valley, where Mary Austin wrote and taught. Their first child, Ruth, born in 1892, was mentally disabled; she was given first of all to the care of another family, and then moved to an institution, where she lived until her death in 1918. Mary Austin separated from her husband in 1905. Three years later, she moved to Italy, where she studied with a religious order known as the Blue Nuns. She spent some time in Paris and London, before returning to the USA, where she divided her time between Carmel and New York. Her views were socialist, feminist and mystical; her writings celebrated the desert life of the American west and Native American culture. Her work includes: idiosyncratic religious writings (such as The Man Jesus, 1915); fiction (including the book of short stories The Basket Woman, 1904, and the novel A Woman of Genius, 1912); children’s books (The Trail Book, 1918); poetry (Children Sing in the Far West, 1928); plays (such as The Arrow Maker, 1911); books on nature (such as The Land of Little Rain, 1903); and an autobiography (Earth Horizon, 1932).
The copy-text of ‘The Readjustment’ comes from its first publication in book form in the volume of short stories Lost Borders (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1909), pp. 154–65.
1. mignonette: a small but fragrant herbaceous plant with yellowish-white flowers.
2. wrapper after three o’clock in the afternoon: a wrapper was an outer garment used for household work. It was sometimes known as a ‘morning wrapper’, and there are indications that this was a garment mainly worn early on in the day. The implication here presumably is that Emma Jeffries has finished all her housework by three o’clock, and that this is evidence of impeccable respectability. To wear one after that hour would look slovenly.
3. syringa-bush: lilac.
4. Pasadena: then a small town in the vicinity of Los Angeles, California, and in the 1900s famed for the clear quality of its warm, dry air and therefore as a winter resort for wealthy Easterners, and a healthy locale for the sick.
5. rod: a measure of distance equal to five and a half yards (six metres).
6. ‘The Lord is my shepherd’: the opening words of Psalm 23.
7. ‘The Lord is nigh… broken heart’: from Psalm 38: 18. The verse continues: ‘and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit’.
8. ‘He shall … evil touch thee’: from Job 5: 19.
9. ‘For thou shalt … waters that are past’: slightly misquoted version of Zophar’s rebuke in Job 11: 16: ‘Because thou shalt forget thy misery, and remember it as waters that pass away.’
EDITH WHARTON
Afterward
Edith (Newbold Jones) Wharton (1862–1937) was an American novelist and short-story writer, an analyst of the opulent New York of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an explorer of the relations between America and Europe. She grew up in an atmosphere of distinguished privilege, educated at home, moving between New York, her birthplace, and the family’s summer house at Newport, Rhode Island. In 1885, she married Edward Wharton; his ill-health prompted travel to Europe, where they settled in Paris. The couple divorced in 1913. Her greatest novels include: The House of Mirth (1905); Ethan Frome (1911), a tragic account of New England life; The Custom of the Country (1913); and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Innocence (1920). Her autobiography is A Backward Glance (1934). As a ghost-story writer, she is indebted to the example of her friend Henry James, though in fact her stories are more given than his to the shocking dénouement.
The copy-text of ‘Afterward’ is from Tales of Men and Ghosts (London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), pp. 323–73. The story was first published in the January 1910 issue of Century Magazine.
1. Pangbourne: there is no Pangbourne in the English west-country county of Dorset, though there is a Pangbourne, many miles east, in Berkshire, on the Thames north-west of Reading.
2. signalement: the description of a person for a passport, or of a wanted criminal (French).
3
. dü: in a manner standard at the time, Wharton attempts to render the West Country accent.
4. coign: a vantage point for observation.
5. Waukesha: Waukesha, then a small town, in Wisconsin, in the upper Midwest of the USA, is ‘the soul-deadening’ and ugly place where the couple have spent their marriage. The New World place name (wrongly supposed to derive from the Algonquin word for ‘little foxes’) forms a linguistic contrast to the old English names of Dorset.
6. Dorchester: a market town in southern central Dorset.
7. Benedictine: the order of monks (known as the ‘Black Monks’ due to the colour of their habits) founded by St Benedict around 529. The Benedictine Rule set out the highly regulated, ascetic and organized life of the monastery, bound by strict rules of punctuality and the orderly division of the day.
8. Cimmerian night: from the opening passage of Book 11 of Homer’s Odyssey, the Cimmerians were a people fabled to live in perpetual darkness at the entrance to Hades, land of the dead.
*To come forrit – to offer oneself as a communicant.
*It was a common belief in Scotland that the devil appeared as a black man. This appears in several witch trials and I think in Law’s Memorials, that delightful store-house of the quaint and grisly.7
* I may remark here that in many old Japanese legends and ballads, ghosts are represented as having power to pull off people’s heads. But so far as the origin of the fear of ghosts is concerned, such stories explain nothing, – since the experiences that evolved the fear must have been real, not imaginary, experiences.
* Mr Rogers was wrong, vide ‘Dombey and Son,’ chapter xii.7