back, when this is done. That’s why it means so much.
And in those days we weren’t separate; it was like a big
jelly, like those blobs that float up on the beach.”
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Philip K. Dick
“Float up,” he said, “and are left there to die.”
“Could you get me a towel?” Tanya asked. “Or a
washcloth? 1 need it.”
He padded into the bathroom for a towel. There— he
was naked, now— he once more saw his shoulder, saw
where it had seized hold of him and held on, dragged
him back, possibly to toy with him a little more.
The marks, unaccountably, were bleeding.
He sponged the blood away. More oozed forth at once
and seeing that, he wondered how much time he had left.
Probably only hours.
Returning to bed, he said, “Could you continue?”
“Sure. If you have any energy left; it’s up to you.” She
lay gazing up at him unwinkingly, barely visible in the
dim nocturnal light.
“I have,” he said. And hugged her to him.
Gertrude Atherton (1857-1948)
The B ell in the Tog
Gertrude Atherton dedicated her first and best collection of
ghost stories, The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories
(1905), "To the Master, Henry Jam es." The title story of
the collection is both an homage to James and an extraordinary critique. Ralph, the central character who becomes obsessed with a painting, is a portrait of the Jam es whom
Atherton knew, and the stamp of emulation is everywhere
in the piece. But in the end, the portrayal is not entirely
sympathetic. O ne wonders what James made of this piece.
An intriguing fact is that Henry James began writing in
1900 upon the request of William Dean Howells a long
story about an "international ghost,” that he wrote in part
and then abandoned when he had difficulty with the plot. In
1915, he took it up again but died before completing The
Sense of the Past, which was published as a fragment
posthumously (1917). Ralph, the central character, becomes obsessed with a century-old painting, and travels back to the past as a "ghost" from the future, who sits for
that very portrait. W hatever the case, “The Bell in the Fog"
is an effective supernatural piece by a feminist writer who
later became James' literary enemy.
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Gertrude Atherton
I
The great author had realized one of the dreams of his
ambitious youth, the possession of an ancestral hall in
England. It was not so much the good American’s
reverence for ancestors that inspired the longing to
consort with the ghosts of an ancient line, as artistic
appreciation of the mellowness, the dignity, the aristocratic aloofness of walls that have sheltered, and furniture that has embraced, generations and generations of the dead. To mere wealth, only his astute and incomparably modem brain yielded respect; his ego raised its goose-flesh at the sight of rooms furnished with a single
check, conciliatory as the taste might be. The dumping
of the old interiors of Europe into the glistening shells of
the United States not only roused him almost to passionate protest, but offended his patriotism— which he classified among his unworked ideals. The average American was not an artist, therefore he had no excuse for even the
affectation of cosmopolitanism. Heaven knew he was
national enough in everything else, from his accent to his
lack of repose; let his surroundings be in keeping.
Orth had left the United States soon after his first
successes, and, his art being too great to be confounded
with locality, he had long since ceased to be spoken of as
an American author. All civilized Europe furnished
stages for his puppets, and, if never picturesque nor
impassioned, his originality was as overwhelming as his
style. His subtleties might not always be understood—
indeed, as a rule, they were not—but the musical
mystery of his language and the penetrating charm of his
lofty and cultivated mind induced raptures in the initiated, forever denied to those who failed to appreciate him.
His following was not a large one, but it was very
distinguished. The aristocracies of the earth gave to it;
and not to understand and admire Ralph Orth was
The Bell in the Fog
103
deliberately to relegate one’s self to the ranks. But the
elect are few, and they frequently subscribe to the circulating libraries; on the Continent, they buy the Tauch-nitz edition; and had not Mr. Orth inherited a sufficiency
of ancestral dollars to enable him to keep rooms in
Jermyn Street, and the wardrobe of an Englishman of
leisure, he might have been forced to consider the tastes
of the middle-class at a desk in Hampstead. But, as it
mercifully was, the fashionable and exclusive sets of
London knew and sought him. He was too wary to
become a fad, and too sophisticated to grate or bore;
consequently, his popularity continued evenly from year
to year, and long since he had come to be regarded as one
of them. He was not keenly addicted to sport, but he
could handle a gun, and all men respected his dignity
and breeding. They cared less for his books than women
did, perhaps because patience is not a characteristic of
their sex. I am alluding, however, in this instance, to
men-of-the-world. A group of young literary men— and
one or two women— put him on a pedestal and kissed
the earth before it. Naturally, they imitated him, and as
this flattered him, and he had a kindly heart deep among
the cere-cloths of his formalities, he sooner or later wrote
“appreciations” of them all, which nobody living could
understand, but which owing to the subtitle and signature answered every purpose.
With all this, however, he was not utterly content.
From the 12th of August until late in the winter— when
he did not go to Homburg and the Riviera— he visited
the best houses in England, slept in state chambers, and
meditated in historic parks; but the country was his one
passion, and he longed for his own acres.
He was turning fifty when his great-aunt died and
made him her heir: “as a poor reward for his immortal
services to literature,” read the will of this phenomenally
appreciative relative. The estate was a large one. There
was a rush for his books; new editions were announced.
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Gertrude Atherton
He smiled with cynicism, not unmixed with sadness; but
he was very grateful for the money, and as soon as his
fastidious taste would permit he bought him a country-
seat.
The place gratified all his ideals and dreams— for he
had romanced about his sometime English possession as
he had never dreamed of woman. It had once been the
property of the Church, and the ruin of cloister and
chapel above the ancient wood was sharp against the low
pale sky. Even the house itself was Tudor, but wealth
from generation to generation had kept it in repair; and
the lawns were as velvety, the hedges as rigid, the trees as
/>
aged as any in his own works. It was not a castle nor a
great property, but it was quite perfect; and for a long
while he felt like a bridegroom on a succession of
honeymoons. He often laid his hand against the rough
ivied walls in a lingering caress.
After a time, he returned the hospitalities of his
friends, and his invitations, given with the exclusiveness
of his great distinction, were never refused. Americans
visiting England eagerly sought for letters to him; and if
they were sometimes benumbed by that cold and formal
presence, and awed by the silences of Chillingsworth—
the few who entered there— they thrilled in anticipation
of verbal triumphs, and forthwith bought an entire set of
his books. It was characteristic that they dared not ask
him for his autograph.
Although women invariably described him as “brilliant,’' a few men affirmed that he was gentle and lovable, and any one of them was well content to spend weeks at
Chillingsworth with no other companion. But, on the
whole, he was rather a lonely man.
It occurred to him how lonely he was one gay June
morning when the sunlight was streaming through his
narrow windows, illuminating tapestries and armor, the
family portraits of the young profligate from whom he
had made this splendid purchase, dusting its gold on
The Bell in the Fog
105
the black wood of wainscot and floor. He was in the
gallery at the moment, studying one of his two favorite
portraits, a gallant little lad in the green costume of
Robin Hood. The boy’s expression was imperious apd
radiant, and he had that perfect beauty which in any
disposition appealed so powerfully to the author. But as
Orth stared today at the brilliant youth, of whose life he
knew nothing, he suddenly became aware of a human
stirring at the foundations of his aesthetic pleasure.
“I wish he were alive and here,” he thought, with a
sigh. “What a jolly little companion he would be! And
this fine old mansion would make a far more complementary setting for him than for me.”
He turned away abruptly, only to find himself face to
face with the portrait of a little girl who was quite unlike
the boy, yet so perfect in her own way, and so unmistakably painted by the same hand, that he had long since concluded they had been brother and sister. She was
angelically fair, and, young as she was— she could not
have been more than six years old— her dark-blue eyes
had a beauty of mind which must have been remarkable
twenty years later. Her pouting mouth was like a little
scarlet serpent, her skin almost transparent, her pale hair
fell waving— not curled with the orthodoxy of childhood
— about her tender bare shoulders. She wore a long
white frock, and clasped tightly against her breast a doll
far more gorgeously arrayed than herself. Behind her
were the ruins and the woods of Chillingsworth.
Orth had studied this portrait many times, for the sake
of an art which he understood almost as well as his own;
but today he saw only the lovely child. He forgot even the
boy in the intensity of this new and personal absorption.
“Did she live to grow up, I wonder?”„he thought. “She
should have made a remarkable, even a famous woman,
with those eyes and that brow, but—could the spirit
within that ethereal frame stand the enlightenments of
maturity? Would not that mind— purged, perhaps, in a
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Gertrude Atherton
long probation from the dross of other existences— flee
in disgust from the commonplace problems of a
woman’s life? Such perfect beings should die while they
are still perfect. Still, it is possible that this little girl,
whoever she was, was idealized by the artist, who
painted into her his own dream of exquisite childhood.”
Again he turned away impatiently. “I believe 1 am
rather fond of children,” he admitted. “I catch myself
watching them on the street when they are pretty
enough. Well, who does not like them?” he added, with
some defiance.
He went back to his work; he was chiselling a story
which was to be the foremost excuse of a magazine as yet
unborn. At the end of half an hour he threw down his
wondrous instrument— which looked not unlike an ordinary pen— and making no attempt to disobey the desire that possessed him, went back to the gallery.
The dark splendid boy, the angelic little girl were all he
saw— even of the several children in that roll call of
the past— and they seemed to look straight down his
eyes into depths where the fragmentary ghosts of unrecorded ancestors gave faint musical response.
“The dead’s kindly recognition of the dead,” he
thought. “But I wish these children were alive.”
For a week he haunted the gallery, and the children
haunted him. Then he became impatient and angry. “I
am mooning like a barren woman,” he exclaimed. “I
must take the briefest way of getting those youngsters off
my mind.”
With the help of his secretary, he ransacked the
library, and finally brought to light the gallery catalogue
which had been named in the inventory. He discovered
that his children were the Viscount Tancred and the
Lady Blanche Mortlake, son and daughter of the second
Earl of Teignmouth. Little wiser than before, he sat down
at once and wrote to the present earl, asking for some
account of the lives of the children. He awaited the
answer with more restlessness than he usually permitted
The Bell in the Fog
107
himself, and took long walks, ostentatiously avoiding the
gallery.
“I believe those youngsters have obsessed me,” he
thought, more than once. “They certainly are beautiful
enough, and the last time I looked at them in that waning
light they were fairly alive. Would that they were, and
scampering about this park.”
Lord Teignmouth, who was intensely grateful to him,
answered promptly.
“I am afraid,” he wrote, “that I don’t know much
about my ancestors— those who didn’t do something or
other; but I have a vague rememberance of having been
told by an aunt of mine, who lives on the family
traditions— she isn’t married— that the little chap was
drowned in the river, and that the little girl died too— I
mean when she was a little girl— wasted away, or
something— I’m such a beastly idiot about expressing
myself, that I wouldn’t dare to write to you at all if you
weren’t really great. That is actually all I can tell you, and
I am afraid the painter was their only biographer.”
The author was gratified that the girl had died young,
but grieved for the boy. Although he had avoided the
gallery of late, his practised imagination had evoked
from the throngs of history the high-handed and brilliant, surely adventurous career of the third Earl of Teignmouth. He
had pondered upon the deep delights of
directing such a mind and character, and had caught
himself envying the dust that was older still. When he
read of the lad’s early death, in spite of his regret that
such promise should have come to naught, he admitted
to a secret thrill of satisfaction that the boy had so soon
ceased to belong to anyone. Then he smiled with both
sadness and humor.
“What an old fool I am!” he admitted. “I believe I not
only wish those children were alive, but that they were
my own.”
The frank admission proved fatal. He made straight
for the gallery. The boy, after the interval of separation,
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Gertrude Atherton
seemed more spiritedly alive than ever, the little girl to
suggest, with her faint appealing smile, that she would
like to be taken up and cuddled.
“I must try another way,” he thought, desperately,
after that long communion. “I must write them out of
ID6>
He went back to the library and locked up the tour de
force which had ceased to command his classic faculty.
At once, he began to write the story of the brief lives of
the children, much to the amazement of that faculty,
which was little accustomed to the simplicities. Nevertheless, before he had written three chapters, he knew that he was at work upon a masterpiece— and more: he
was experiencing a pleasure so keen that once and again
his hand trembled, and he saw the page through a mist.
Although his characters had always been objective to
himself and his more patient readers, none knew better
than he— a man of no delusions—that they were so
remote and exclusive as barely to escape being mere
mentalities; they were never the pulsing living creations
of the more full-blooded genius. But he had been content
to have it so. His creations might find and leave him
cold, but he had known his highest satisfaction in
chiselling the statuettes, extracting subtle and elevating
harmonies, while combining words as no man of his
tongue had combined them before.
But the children were not statuettes. He had loved and
brooded over them long ere he had thought to tuck them
into his pen, and on its first stroke they danced out alive.
Visions of Fear - Foundations of Fear III (1992) Page 13