Ghosts in the House
Page 34
In a splendid closing paragraph, for which I make no apology for quoting in full, Arthur Benson gives us a charming and optimistic philosophy that is also very moving. Whatever demons the Bensons may have had, they also possessed a touching and sincere faith.
If one believed that life were all, that there was no experience beyond the dark grave and the mouldering clay, it would be a miserable task enough to creep cautiously through life, just holding on to its tangible advantages and cautiously enjoying its delights. But I do most utterly believe that there is a truth beyond that satisfies our sharpest cravings and our wildest dreams, and that if we have loved what is high and good, even for a halting minute, it will come to bless us consciously and abundantly before we have done with experience. Many of our dreams are heavy-hearted enough; we are hampered by the old faults, and by the body that not only cannot answer the demands of the spirit, but bars the way with its own urgent claims and desires. But whatever hope we can frame or conceive of peace and truth and nobleness and light shall be wholly and purely fulfilled; and even if we are separated by a season, as we must be separated, from those whom we love and journey with, there is a union ahead of us when we shall remember gratefully the old dim days, and the path which we trod in hope and fear together; when all the trouble we have wrought to ourselves and others will vanish into the shadow of a faded dream, in the sweetness and glory of some great city of God, full of fire and music and all the radiant visions of uplifted hearts, which visited us so faintly and yet so beckoningly in the old frail days.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The stories in this book come from the following sources:
A.C. Benson
The Hill of Trouble (Pitman, 1903):
‘The Closed Window’
‘The Snake, The Leper and The Grey Frost’
‘The Gray Cat’
‘The Hill of Trouble’
‘The Red Camp’
(the two spellings of ‘grey’ are as in the original)
The Isles of Sunset (Isbister, 1905):
‘The Slype House’
‘Out of the Sea’
Basil Netherby (Hutchinson, 1927):
‘Basil Netherby’
‘The Uttermost Farthing’
R.H. Benson
The Light Invisible (Isbister, 1903):
‘The Traveller’
‘The Blood-Eagle’
‘The Watcher’
A Mirror of Shalott (Pitman, 1907):
‘Father Bianchi’s Story’
‘Father Brent’s Tale’
‘My Own Tale’
‘Father Maddox’s Tale’
‘Father Macclesfield’s Tale’
‘Mr Percival’s Tale’
‘Father Meuron’s Tale’
Also of interest:
A.C.Benson: The Child of the Dawn (Smith, Elder, 1912)
A.C. Benson: Paul the Minstrel (Smith, Elder, 1911). Collects the stories from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset into one (rather handy) volume.
Several autobiographical and biographical books give interesting details of the Bensons and their ghost story writing:
A.C. Benson: Hugh – Memoirs of a Brother (Smith, Elder, 1915)
E.F. Benson: Final Edition (Longmans, 1940)
R.H. Benson: Confessions of a Convert (Longmans, 1913)
Michael Cox: M.R. James: An Informal Portrait (OUP, 1983)
E.H. Ryle (ed.) Arthur Christopher Benson: As seen by some friends (G. Bell, 1925). A memorial volume to ACB, rushed out shortly after his death, valuable as it includes a piece on him by M.R. James.
David Williams: Genesis and Exodus: A Portrait of the Benson Family (Hamish Hamilton, 1979). The best Benson history to date.
Footnotes
Haunted Houses
fn1 Hare Street House, in the village of Hare Street, near Buntingford, Hertfordshire, where Benson lived from 1907 to his death. Its ghostly qualities are not mentioned in his or his brothers’ books. (HL)
fn2 Benson’s discreet ‘B— House’ refers to Ballechin House, Strathtay, Perthshire, the scene of an amusing investigation in the 1890s. The variety and number of ghosts seen increased in proportion to the variety and number of investigators. One of the researchers, Annie Goodrich-Freer, wrote an account of the haunting in which she carefully avoided naming the house (referring to B— House throughout), but spelt out the name of Ballechin village in full! This case apparently influenced Shirley Jackson when she wrote The Haunting of Hill House; the terrifying ghost banging on a door was also reported at Ballechin. Benson’s ‘amazing place in Worcestershire’ defeats me, I’m afraid; perhaps a reader can oblige. (HL)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Ghosts in the House seems to have followed the Benson tradition of being around for a while before getting published. I’m grateful to Jack Sullivan and Peg Streep for the inclusion of my 1984 article on the Bensons in The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Horror and the Supernatural, which really started the idea of a Bensons collection (in fact, I think Peg Streep first suggested it). I made various rough listings for it, at first using all three Bensons, but then EFB’s revival and reprinting made it more sensible to concentrate on ACB and RHB. It was turned down umpteen times (in one publisher’s opinion ‘it was not the stuff that dreams are made of’ – well, that’s all right, then), and nearly made it on to the late Michael Cox’s classic Equation Chillers list in the late 1980s.
The late Richard Dalby came up with R.H. Benson’s ‘Haunted Houses’, and grateful thanks are due to him for tracking it down and supplying a copy. And grateful thanks as well to David Brawn at HarperCollins, for his friendly and enthusiastic revival of the Chillers series – and my editing career!
Also in this series
THE BLACK REAPER
Bernard Capes
DRACULA’S BRETHREN
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Fergus Hume,
Louisa May Alcott & Others
DRACULA’S BROOD
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James,
Algernon Blackwood & Others
IN THE DARK
E. Nesbit
THE INVISIBLE EYE
Erckmann–Chatrian
OUT OF THE DARK
Robert W. Chambers
THREE MEN IN THE DARK
Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain & Robert Barr
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