Shivers for Christmas

by Richard Dalby

  The cry of the wolves rose on the still winter air and floated round the castle walls in long-drawn piercing wails; the old woman lay back on her couch with a look of long-delayed happiness on her face.

  ‘Go away,’ she said to the Baroness; ‘I am not lonely any more. I am one of a great old family…’

  ‘I think she is dying,’ said the Baroness when she had rejoined her guests; ‘I suppose we must send for a doctor. And that terrible howling! Not for much money would I have such death-music’

  ‘That music is not to be bought for any amount of money,’ said Conrad.

  ‘Hark! What is that other sound?’ asked the Baron, as a noise of splitting and crashing was heard.

  It was a tree falling in the park.

  There was a moment of constrained silence, and then the banker’s wife spoke.

  ‘It is the intense cold that is splitting the trees. It is also the cold that has brought the wolves out in such numbers. It is many years since we have had such a cold winter.’

  The Baroness eagerly agreed that the cold was responsible for these things. It was the cold of the open window, too, which caused the heart failure that made the doctor’s ministrations unnecessary for the old Fräulein. But the notice in the newspapers looked very well—

  ‘On December 29th, at Schloss Cernogratz, Amalie von Cernogratz, for many years the valued friend of Baron and Baroness Gruebel.’

  __________________________________________

  GANTHONY’S

  WIFE

  E. Temple Thurston

  __________________________________________

  Ernest Temple Thurston (1879–1933) achieved enormous success with his novels The Apple of Eden (1905), The City of Beautiful Nonsense (1909), The Greatest Wish in the World (1910), and a trilogy of the life of Richard Furlong. Often mixing humour with pathos, he was particularly adept with his insights into the psychology of the feminine soul. ‘Ganthony’s Wife’ is taken from his collection The Rossetti, and Other Tales (1926).

  The custom of telling stories round the fire on Christmas Eve is dying out, like letterwriting and all the amateur domestic arts of the last century. Our stories are told us by professionals and broadcast to thousands by the printing machine. We give our letters to a dictaphone or a stenographer. The personal touch is going out of life, if it has not already gone. In an age where every conceivable machine is invented to save time and labour, we have no time to spare for these things. We are too exhausted from working our machines to give them our attention.

  We were saying all this last year as we sat round a blazing wood fire at that little house party the Stennings give every Christmas in that Tudor house of theirs on the borders of Kent and Sussex.

  The children had gone to bed. There were five of us grown-ups left round the broad open fire-place where huge oak logs were burning on the glowing heart of a pile of silver ashes that had been red-hot for a week or more.

  Miss Valerie Brett, the actress, was sitting inside the chimney corner warming first one toe, then the other. She comes there every Christmas. The children love her. She can make funny noises with her mouth. Also by facial contortion, she can look like Queen Victoria on the heads of all the pennies that ever were minted. In a semi-circle outside we sat, the rest of us, Stenning and his wife, Northanger and myself, smoking our various smokes and sipping that punch, the secret of which Stenning learnt from an old wine merchant in Winthrop Street, Cork. I think he relies on it to secure the few select guests he always has at his Christmas parties.

  ‘Come down for Christmas. Punch.’

  This is a common form of his invitation.

  We had been playing games with the children, hide-and-seek being the most popular. We were all a bit exhausted. It was Mrs Stenning who opened the discussion by complaining that there was no one qualified to tell children ghost stories nowadays.

  ‘We had a man here last Christmas,’ she said, ‘and he began one, but the children guessed the end of it before it was half- way through.’

  ‘Bless ’em,’ said Miss Brett.

  ‘It was a rotten story, anyhow,’ said Stenning. ‘You can’t make a mystery now by just rattling a chain and slamming a door and blowing out the candle. When the candle went out, young John said, “Why didn’t he shut the window?” Our amiable story teller assured John that he did, but he wasn’t convincing about it, because Emily said, “’Spect it was like that window up in my bedroom. The wind comes through there when it’s shut and blows the curtains about.”’

  Mrs Stenning sighed.

  ‘I suppose they know too much,’ she said—‘and all I’ve done, you don’t know, to try and keep them simple.’

  ‘They don’t know too much,’ said Northanger. ‘It’s more likely we who know too little. We don’t believe in the rattling chain and the extinguished candle ourselves. We’ve been laughing at them for the last twenty years, and they’ve caught up with us.’

  ‘Do you mean this civilization’s at the end of its evolution?’ I asked.

  ‘Either that,’ said he, ‘or we’re in one of those hanging pauses, like a switchback when it gets to the top of a crest and just crawls over the top till it gathers a fresh impetus to rise to a higher crest. It’s only pessimists who say we’re finished. Shedding an old skin is a proper process of nature. There are signs of the old skin going.’

  Northanger is a queer chap. He talks very little. This was voluble for him. As usually happens with a man like that, we listened.

  ‘What signs?’ asked Miss Brett.

  ‘All sorts,’ said he. ‘There’s even a new ghost. I saw one last Christmas.’

  ‘You saw one?’

  Two or three of us spoke at once.

  ‘I saw one,’ he repeated.

  If a man like Northanger admits to seeing a ghost, we felt there must be something in it. It would not be a mere turnip head with a candle inside.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us when the children were here?’ asked Mrs Stenning immediately.

  ‘It’s not a story for children,’ he replied. ‘Though I don’t know why it shouldn’t be. They wouldn’t understand it, and that’s the first quality required of a ghost story.’

  ‘Tell us.’

  This was practically simultaneous from everybody. Miss Brett pulled her feet up on to the chimney-corner seat, Stenning slipped over to the table and brought round the punch bowl to fill our glasses. I say ‘slipped over’ because he moved like a man who does not want to disturb an atmosphere. Somehow that chap Northanger had put a grip on us. We felt he knew that what he was going to tell us was unknowable. He had indeed created an atmosphere, the atmosphere that Stenning was careful not to disturb. There was the proper sort of hush in the air while he was filling our glasses. No one had lit the lights since we had been playing at hide-and-seek. We were all grouped around the light of the fire. Then Northanger began.

  ‘Do any of you know Ganthony—Ganthony’s a tea planter in Ceylon?’

  None of us did.

  ‘Well—that makes it better,’ said he. Then he looked across at Miss Brett. ‘You and I haven’t met before, Miss Brett,’ he said, ‘till our good friends brought us together this Christmas. I’ve seen you on the stage, but not being one of those admirers who have the courage to offer their congratulations without introduction, you haven’t seen me till now.’

  In that prelude, I suddenly had a glimpse of Northanger’s way with women, an odd sardonic sort of way, too subtle for most of them, but conveying with it an impression that he was not unsusceptible.

  She smiled as he continued:

  ‘In case our good friends haven’t told you then,’ he went on, ‘it’s necessary to say I’m a bachelor. I have rooms in Stretton Street, Piccadilly. I’ve been there seventeen years. When they pull down Devonshire House, they pull me off my perch. That’ll be the end of Stretton Street. I don’t mean my going. But without the restraining influence of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts and the Duke of Devonshire, Stretton Street will become anyb
ody’s street. A cinema theatre in those new buildings they are going to put up on the site of Devonshire House will send Stretton Street to the dogs. It’s like that with people. Ninety per cent of us live by example. However, my story’s about Ganthony.

  ‘It was last Christmas. I mean 1923. I was staying in town. I often do. I like London on Christmas Day.’

  Miss Brett shuddered.

  ‘Yes—I know,’ said Northanger. ‘London seems dead to lots of people when the shops are shut, and the theatres are closed. It doesn’t get me like that. It seems alive to me.’

  ‘What with?’ It was Mrs Stenning who asked this.

  ‘With the spirits of people. We were talking about ghosts. Well, how could you expect a ghost to clank a chain when the rattle of motor buses would drown the noise of it out of existence? What’s the good of blowing out candles when the streets are daylight with night signs? There’s one thing I always do when I’m in London on Christmas Day. I go to my club. It used to be one of the old gaming houses before the Regency. Modern interior decoration has hidden all that, but on Christmas Day, when some of the rooms are absolutely empty, they come back, the old gamesters. You can feel them about you. Imagination, I know—but who has properly defined what imagination is? Memory’s impulse of association isn’t good enough. Where does the impulse come from?

  ‘I always go to my club. I went there that afternoon and to my amazement found Ganthony in the smoking-room writing letters. Ganthony is one of those men who belong to a London club and appear in it, somewhat like a comet, at rare intervals. Suddenly he walks in, gets his letters from the hall porter, fills a waste-paper basket with the accumulated rubbish, and writes a pile of answers. For the next week or so you can find him practically at any moment on the premises. Then one day, you say to the hall porter, “Mr Ganthony in the club?” “Mr Ganthony, sir? He’s gone.”

  ‘Perhaps as much as three years go by before you see him again. That Christmas Day I hadn’t seen him for four years at least. He was surrounded with letters and was writing for all he was worth. I think he was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He’d just come home from Ceylon—didn’t know how long he was going to stay. He never does. I picked out a comfortable chair and we talked. Presently I inquired about his wife, whether he’d brought her with him—how she was. His eyes went like pebbles when the water’s dried off them.

  ‘“My wife died nearly a year ago,” said he.

  ‘I must tell you about Ganthony’s wife. He had met and married her during the War. But the War had nothing to do with it. We’ve got into the habit of putting those hurried marriages down to the War. Whenever they’d met, Ganthony would have married her. It was the case of a man meeting the fate that was in store for him and rushing to it like a bit of steel to a magnet. What he had meant to her I’ve never been able to quite satisfy my mind about. The relationships that circumstance contrives between individuals must have some sort of scheme about them. But I’m blowed if it’s possible to begin to think what it is or how it’s regulated.

  ‘Ganthony met her in a restaurant. He’d just come out of hospital. Been knocked out by a shell burst on Vimy Ridge. His face had been cut about and was still all wrapped in bandages. One side of his face was fairly clear—on the other, his eye just peeped out of a mass of lint. He didn’t care what he looked like. In fact I think it rather amused him to go and dine in public. He went alone.

  ‘She was dining at a table a few yards away with a man. Like everyone else she was attracted by the sight of this bandaged face of Ganthony’s. She drew her companion’s attention. I had all this from Ganthony himself just before he was married. It was as though she said, “They’ve been knocking him about— haven’t they?”

  ‘The man looked at him for a moment or two. Wounded men were pretty common those days. He was a soldier himself. He was in khaki. He took no more notice. But the woman went on looking. Every other second Ganthony caught her eye. More than that, he could see she didn’t want her companion to notice it. Something about it intrigued Ganthony. The scheme, whatever it is, was beginning to work. The fate was beginning to draw him. He smiled—so far as that was possible with half his face in bandages. She smiled in return—one of those smiles a woman can hide from everyone but the person for whom it is intended. In a few minutes they were talking to each other with their eyes, that sort of conversation that isn’t hampered with the expression and meaning of mere words.

  ‘Ganthony cut a course out and finished his meal before they did. He ordered his bill when she was looking at him. He paid it, looked at the door, then at her, then he got up and went out. He hadn’t to wait more than two seconds before she was outside on the pavement beside him. She’d made some excuse to her companion. She had for decency’s sake to go back and finish her dinner. They arranged to meet later.

  ‘They were married in a week. No need to tell you more than that. You can put it down to the War if you like. But Ganthony wasn’t the sort of man to marry that sort of woman just because there was a war on. He did it with his eyes open even if his face was bandaged. He knew the kind she was. He knew he wasn’t the first, but I suppose he may have thought that when he took her out to Ceylon after he was quit of the War, he would be the last. I never thought so. But it was no good telling him that. When a man runs into his fate as he did, platitudes and speculations about morals don’t stop him. He has to find things out for himself. God disposes sometimes, it seems to me before and after a man’s proposal.

  ‘Anyhow that’s as much as it has to do with this story. Ganthony had married and now his wife was dead. I confess to a feeling of satisfaction when I heard it. She was a beautiful woman no doubt—intensely attractive. I had never seen her, but he had sent me a snapshot of himself and her from Ceylon after they got out there. However, attraction isn’t everything. It invites, but it doesn’t always entertain.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very much like a ghost story,’ said Mrs Stenning.

  Northanger apologized.

  ‘I warned you it wasn’t a ghost story for children,’ said he.‘I told you they wouldn’t understand it. I doubt if I understand it myself.’

  ‘Shove a log on, Valerie,’ said Stenning, ‘and don’t interrupt him, Grace. The man’s earning his punch with me anyhow. Go on, Northanger. You tell it your own way. Women always want to see the last page. Ganthony’s wife was dead.’

  ‘Yes—dead,’ Northanger went on. ‘Ganthony saw her dead. They had lived in Colombo for the first six or eight months and apparently in that short time, he came to know how attractive she was. And yet, it was not only her physical attraction for men, he told me, as a sort of fatality about her that drew them as it had drawn him.

  ‘Apparently he knew nothing in fact. She was not so much secretive about it, as almost mysterious. As far as I can make out, it was as though she had a vocation for that sort of life, like the sacred women in the temple of Osiris at Thebes. I can imagine her having been extraordinarily mysterious with that other man in the restaurant when she first met Ganthony. She must have just slipped away from him when that dinner was over. At one moment he may have thought she was his for the evening. The next she was gone.

  ‘It was the beginning of that feeling in Ganthony that at any moment he might lose her, made him leave Colombo and take her up country to a spot close to his plantations. She made no complaint. It was not as though she were a gay woman and were being torn away from her gaiety. She went without a word. He was terribly fond of her. Any fool could have seen that. Notwithstanding the way he had met her, it had not continued to be promiscuous with him. She was a sacred women to him right enough. He told me about her death, in that slow, measured sort of way as a man walks at the end of a journey. Whatever she’d been, her death had left a wound in his life that wouldn’t heal in a hurry.’

  ‘Are we to hear how she did die?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes—I want to hear how she died,’ said Miss Brett.

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said Northanger. ‘Away
there up country, Ganthony felt she was safe. Except down at the plantations, there were no Englishmen about. After a few months up there, when she seemed to be quite contented, Ganthony had to go down to Colombo on business. He was gone three days. When he came back, she was gone. The native servants were in a panic. He scoured the country for two days. They’d heard nothing of her down at the plantations. She’d vanished—slipped away. On the third day, coming back after a fruitless search, he found a Buddhist priest waiting for him at his bungalow. All the man would say was, “I’ve come to bring you to see the memsahib.” Ganthony followed him. Again and again he asked the fellow what was the matter, threatened him, tried to frighten him, but he’d say nothing except—“You shall see the memsahib.”

  ‘On the side of a hill about three miles from Ganthony’s bungalow, there was a Buddhist monastery. He was taken there, and there on a rough sort of bed in one of the rooms—it was a rest place—he found his wife lying—dead. There was no question of getting a doctor. There was not a doctor within miles.

  ‘I asked him if he was sure she was dead, and he turned those stone eyes of his on me.

  ‘“You have to be your own doctor out there,” said he, “and there are one or two things you can’t fail to recognize. Death’s one of ’em. She’d been dead some time. She was quite cold. There’s no mistaking when the spirit’s gone out of the body. Hers was gone. I could feel it had. She lay there, just a dead body, and I felt I couldn’t touch her then—it seemed repulsive without her spirit.”

  ‘I asked him how she got there, what he thought she’d died of, how long he imagined she’d been dead. None of his answers were very elaborate. He made it out to be fever. She had walked by herself into the monastery. She must have been dead two days. He arrived at that decision apart from what the monks told him.