American supernatural tales

by S. T. Joshi

  I could tell more, but I cannot see what help it will be to the world. As for me I am past human help or hope. As I lie here, writing, careless even whether or not I die before I finish, I can see the doctor gathering up his powders and phials with a vague gesture to the good priest beside me, which I understand.

  They will be very curious to know the tragedy—they of the outside world who write books and print millions of newspapers, but I shall write no more, and the father confessor will seal my last words with the seal of sanctity when his holy office is done. They of the outside world may send their creatures into wrecked homes and death-smitten firesides, and their newspapers will batten on blood and tears, but with me their spies must halt before the confessional. They know that Tessie is dead and that I am dying. They know how the people in the house, aroused by an infernal scream, rushed into my room and found one living and two dead, but they do not know what I shall tell them now; they do not know that the doctor said as he pointed to a horrible decomposed heap on the floor—the livid corpse of the watchman from the church: “I have no theory, no explanation. That man must have been dead for months!”

  I think I am dying. I wish the priest would——

  HENRY JAMES

  Henry James was born in 1843 in New York, the son of the philosopher Henry James, Sr., and the brother of the philosopher and psychologist William James. James and his brother received most of their education in a succession of schools in Europe, thereby gaining the cosmopolitanism that would color his outlook throughout his life. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law School but left after a year. In 1864 his first story was published; his first novel, Watch and Ward, appeared in 1871. In 1875 James permanently left the United States, settling in England in 1876. It was there that his most celebrated novels were written: The American (1877), Daisy Miller (1879), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Bostonians (1886), What Maisie Knew (1897), The Awkward Age (1899), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1903). Many of these novels examine, with an unparalleled subtlety of psychological analysis, the effect of sophisticated European culture upon Americans. James was naturalized as a British citizen in 1915. He died in London in 1916, shortly after receiving the Order of Merit.

  For James, the supernatural was a lifelong concern, chiefly as a means of probing psychological states. Leon Edel’s edition of The Ghostly Tales of Henry James (1949) includes eighteen short stories and novelettes written between 1868 and 1908, the most celebrated of which, The Turn of the Screw (first published in The Two Magics, 1898), has spawned a veritable library of critical analysis, largely centering on whether the supernatural—in the form of the ghosts of the valet Peter Quint and the governess Miss Jessel, who appear to haunt two young children—actually comes into play. Other tales, such as “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”

  (1868), a tale of jealousy between sisters, “Sir Edmund Orme” (1891), about a daytime ghost, and “The Jolly Corner” (1908), a story that dances between the supernatural and the psychological, are also well known. “The Real Right Thing” (first published in Collier’s Weekly, December 16, 1899) is another ambiguous tale, in which we can never be certain whether the ghost of a dead author has genuinely manifested itself.

  THE REAL RIGHT THING

  I

  When, after the death of Ashton Doyne—but three months after—George Withermore was approached, as the phrase is, on the subject of a “volume,” the communication came straight from his publishers, who had been, and indeed much more, Doyne’s own; but he was not surprised to learn, on the occurrence of the interview they next suggested, that a certain pressure as to the early issue of a Life had been applied them by their late client’s widow. Doyne’s relations with his wife had been to Withermore’s knowledge a special chapter—which would present itself, by the way, as a delicate one for the biographer; but a sense of what she had lost, and even of what she had lacked, had betrayed itself, on the poor woman’s part, from the first days of her bereavement, sufficiently to prepare an observer at all initiated for some attitude of reparation, some espousal even exaggerated of the interests of a distinguished name. George Withermore was, as he felt, initiated; yet what he had not expected was to hear that she had mentioned him as the person in whose hands she would most promptly place the materials for a book.

  These materials—diaries, letters, memoranda, notes, documents of many sorts—were her property and wholly in her control, no conditions at all attaching to any portion of her heritage; so that she was free at present to do as she liked—free in particular to do nothing. What Doyne would have arranged had he had time to arrange could be but supposition and guess. Death had taken him too soon and too suddenly, and there was all the pity that the only wishes he was known to have expressed were wishes leaving it positively out. He had broken short off—that was the way of it; and the end was ragged and needed trimming. Withermore was conscious, abundantly, of how close he had stood to him, but also was not less aware of his comparative obscurity. He was young, a journalist, a critic, a hand-to-mouth character, with little, as yet, of any striking sort, to show. His writings were few and small, his relations scant and vague. Doyne, on the other hand, had lived long enough—above all had had talent enough—to become great, and among his many friends gilded also with greatness were several to whom his wife would have affected those who knew her as much more likely to appeal.

  The preference she had at all events uttered—and uttered in a roundabout considerate way that left him a measure of freedom—made our young man feel that he must at least see her and that there would be in any case a good deal to talk about. He immediately wrote to her, she as promptly named an hour, and they had it out. But he came away with his particular idea immensely strengthened. She was a strange woman, and he had never thought her an agreeable, yet there was something that touched him now in her bustling blundering zeal. She wanted the book to make up, and the individual whom, of her husband’s set, she probably believed she might most manipulate was in every way to help it to do so. She hadn’t taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a full reply to every imputation on herself. She had scantly known how such books were constructed, but she had been looking and had learned something. It alarmed Withermore a little from the first to see that she’d wish to go in for quantity. She talked of “volumes,” but he had his notion of that.

  “My thought went straight to you, as his own would have done,” she had said almost as soon as she rose before him there in her large array of mourning—with her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt ugly tragic, but striking and, as might have been thought from a certain point of view, “elegant” presence. “You’re the one he liked most; oh much!”—and it had quite sufficed to turn Withermore’s head. It little mattered that he could afterwards wonder if she had known Doyne enough, when it came to that, to be sure. He would have said for himself indeed that her testimony on such a point could scarcely count. Still, there was no smoke without fire; she knew at least what she meant, and he wasn’t a person she could have an interest in flattering. They went up together without delay to the great man’s vacant study at the back of the house and looking over the large green garden—a beautiful and inspiring scene to poor Withermore’s view—common to the expensive row.

  “You can perfectly work here, you know,” said Mrs. Doyne: “you shall have the place quite to yourself—I’ll give it all up to you; so that in the evenings in particular, don’t you see? It will be perfection for quiet and privacy.”

  Perfection indeed, the young man felt as he looked about—having explained that, as his actual occupation was an evening paper and his earlier hours, for a long time yet, regularly taken up, he should have to come always at night. The place was full of their lost friend; everything in it had belonged to him; everything they touched had been part of his life. It was all at once too much for Withermore—too great an honour and even too great a care; memories still recent
came back to him, so that, while his heart beat faster and his eyes filled with tears, the pressure of his loyalty seemed almost more than he could carry. At the sight of his tears Mrs. Doyne’s own rose to her lids, and the two for a minute only looked at each other. He half-expected her to break out “Oh help me to feel as I know you know I want to feel!” And after a little one of them said, with the other’s deep assent—it didn’t matter which: “It’s here that we’re with him.” But it was definitely the young man who put it, before they left the room, that it was there he was with themselves.

  The young man began to come as soon as he could arrange it, and then it was, on the spot, in the charmed stillness, between the lamp and the fire and with the curtains drawn, that a certain intenser consciousness set in for him. He escaped from the black London November; he passed through the large hushed house and up the red-carpeted staircase where he only found in his path the whisk of a soundless trained maid or the reach, out of an open room, of Mrs. Doyne’s queenly weeds and approving tragic face; and then, by a mere touch of the well-made door that gave so sharp and pleasant a click, shut himself in for three or four warm hours with the spirit—as he had always distinctly declared it—of his master. He was not a little frightened when, even the first night, it came over him that he had really been most affected, in the whole matter, by the prospect, the privilege and the luxury, of this sensation. He hadn’t, he could now reflect, definitely considered the question of the book—as to which there was here even already much to consider: he had simply let his affection and admiration—to say nothing of his gratified pride—meet to the full the temptation Mrs. Doyne had offered them.

  How did he know without more thought, he might begin to ask himself, that the book was on the whole to be desired? What warrant had he ever received from Ashton Doyne himself for so direct and, as it were, so familiar an approach? Great was the art of biography, but there were lives and lives, there were subjects and subjects. He confusedly recalled, so far as that went, old words dropped by Doyne over contemporary compilations, suggestions of how he himself discriminated as to other heroes and other panoramas. He even remembered how his friend would at moments have shown himself as holding that the “literary” career might—save in the case of a Johnson and a Scott, with a Boswell and a Lockhart to help—best content itself to be represented. The artist was what he did—he was nothing else. Yet how on the other hand wasn’t he, George Withermore, poor devil, to have jumped at the chance of spending his winter in an intimacy so rich? It had been simply dazzling—that was the fact. It hadn’t been the “terms,” from the publishers—though these were, as they said at the office, all right; it had been Doyne himself, his company and contact and presence, it had been just what it was turning out, the possibility of an intercourse closer than that of life. Strange that death, of the two things, should have the fewer mysteries and secrets! The first night our young man was alone in the room it struck him his master and he were really for the first time together.

  II

  Mrs. Doyne had for the most part let him expressively alone, but she had on two or three occasions looked in to see if his needs had been met, and he had had the opportunity of thanking her on the spot for the judgement and zeal with which she had smoothed his way. She had to some extent herself been looking things over and had been able already to muster several groups of letters; all the keys of drawers and cabinets she had moreover from the first placed in his hands, with helpful information as to the apparent whereabouts of different matters. She had put him, to be brief, in the fullest possible possession, and whether or no her husband had trusted her she at least, it was clear, trusted her husband’s friend. There grew upon Withermore nevertheless the impression that in spite of all these offices she wasn’t yet at peace and that a certain unassuageable anxiety continued even to keep step with her confidence. Though so full of consideration she was at the same time perceptibly there: he felt her, through a supersubtle sixth sense that the whole connexion had already brought into play, hover, in the still hours, at the top of landings and on the other side of doors; he gathered from the soundless brush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings. One evening when, at his friend’s table, he had lost himself in the depths of correspondence, he was made to start and turn by the suggestion that some one was behind him. Mrs. Doyne had come in without his hearing the door, and she gave a strained smile, as he sprang to his feet. “I hope,” she said, “I haven’t frightened you.”

  “Just a little—I was so absorbed. It was as if, for the instant,” the young man explained, “it had been himself.”

  The oddity of her face increased in her wonder. “Ashton?”

  “He does seem so near,” said Withermore.

  “To you too?”

  This naturally struck him. “He does then to you?”

  She waited, not moving from the spot where she had first stood, but looking round the room as if to penetrate its duskier angles. She had a way of raising to the level of her nose the big black fan which she apparently never laid aside and with which she thus covered the lower half of her face, her rather hard eyes, above it, becoming the more ambiguous. “Sometimes.”

  “Here,” Withermore went on, “it’s as if he might at any moment come in. That’s why I jumped just now. The time’s so short since he really used to—it only was yesterday. I sit in his chair, I turn his books, I use his pens, I stir his fire—all exactly as if, learning he would presently be back from a walk, I had come up here contentedly to wait. It’s delightful—but it’s strange.”

  Mrs. Doyne, her fan still up, listened with interest. “Does it worry you?”

  “No—I like it.”

  Again she faltered. “Do you ever feel as if he were—a—quite—a—personally in the room?”

  “Well, as I said just now,” her companion laughed, “on hearing you behind me I seemed to take it so. What do we want, after all,” he asked, “but that he shall be with us?”

  “Yes, as you said he’d be—that first time.” She gazed in full assent. “He is with us.”

  She was rather portentous, but Withermore took it smiling. “Then we must keep him. We must do only what he’d like.”

  “Oh only that of course—only. But if he is here——?” And her sombre eyes seemed to throw it out in vague distress over her fan.

  “It proves he’s pleased and wants only to help? Yes, surely; it must prove that.”

  She gave a light gasp and looked again round the room. “Well,” she said as she took leave of him, “remember that I too want only to help.” On which, when she had gone, he felt sufficiently that she had come in simply to see he was all right.

  He was all right more and more, it struck him after this, for as he began to get into his work he moved, as it appeared to him, but the closer to the idea of Doyne’s personal presence. When once this fancy had begun to hang about him he welcomed it, persuaded it, encouraged it, quite cherished it, looking forward all day to feeling it renew itself in the evening, and waiting for the growth of dusk very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment. The smallest accidents humoured and confirmed it, and by the end of three or four weeks he had come fully to regard it as the consecration of his enterprise. Didn’t it just settle the question of what Doyne would have thought of what they were doing? What they were doing was what he wanted done, and they could go on from step to step without scruple or doubt. Withermore rejoiced indeed at moments to feel this certitude: there were times of dipping deep into some of Doyne’s secrets when it was particularly pleasant to be able to hold that Doyne desired him, as it were, to know them. He was learning many things he hadn’t suspected—drawing many curtains, forcing many doors, reading many riddles, going, in general, as they said, behind almost everything. It was at an occasional sharp turn of some of the duskier of these wanderings “behind” that he really, of a sudden, most felt himself, in the intimate sensible way, face to face with his friend; so that he could scarce have t
old, for the instant, if their meeting occurred in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past or at the hour and in the place that actually held him. Was it a matter of ’67?—or but of the other side of the table?

  Happily, at any rate, even in the vulgarest light publicity could ever shed, there would be the great fact of the way Doyne was “coming out.” He was coming out too beautifully—better yet than such a partisan as Withermore could have supposed. All the while as well, nevertheless, how would this partisan have represented to any one else the special state of his own consciousness? It wasn’t a thing to talk about—it was only a thing to feel. There were moments for instance when, while he bent over his papers, the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him. There were moments when, had he been able to look up, the other side of the table would have shown him this companion as vividly as the shaded lamplight showed him his page. That he couldn’t at such a juncture look up was his own affair, for the situation was ruled—that was but natural—by deep delicacies and fine timidities, the dread of too sudden or too rude an advance. What was intensely in the air was that if Doyne was there it wasn’t nearly so much for himself as for the young priest of his altar. He hovered and lingered, he came and went, he might almost have been, among the books and the papers, a hushed discreet librarian, doing the particular things, rendering the quiet aid, liked by men of letters.