Christmas had come and gone whilst Paul lay in his bed; and it was not until the end of January that he nerved himself to revisit the rectory. It seemed deserted. No one answered his repeated knock; and of his Uncle Nicholas there was no sign whatsoever. He considered examining the chapel—but became conscious of a repugnance so extreme he abandoned the attempt. The Spring term beckoned, he had work to do, examinations to sit; Paul Bernays tidied his house and prepared to return to Cambridge. Sorting through various papers belonging to the estate he came across a bundle of ancient correspondence; letters apparently written by Nicholas Bernays to his father, the squire of West Farthing. The ink had faded and the words (which seemed to have been written by someone in a violent rage) proved uncommonly hard to decipher. Ill-formed characters sprawled across the page at an angle; at one point the nib of the pen had actually gone straight through the document.
‘. . . he is my friend! My friend! I do not care if you disinherit me! I shall devote my life to him! You have been listening to vile slanders, the babble of the village idiots who have all run away. He is a great man! It is not true that he worships the . . .’
Here followed a word which might have been Devil; but Paul could not be certain—besides, he was pressed for time, and so he threw the letters away.
Two events only remain to be told. On putting on his raincoat preparatory to leaving West Farthing, the young man discovered a pair of black leather gloves in the pocket; a curious circumstance as he did not possess any black leather gloves. Further consideration led him to the belief that he had in fact got the wrong raincoat—by some accident in the dim light of the rectory hall, he had picked up the Reverend Halsey’s coat, and that gentleman had picked up his. The two garments were not dissimilar. (In passing it might be well if the manufacturers were to make these items of clothing more distinctive, thus avoiding possibly—unfortunate—mistakes. )
At Cambridge Paul resumed his studies, happily showing no ill effects from his disastrous adventure. But his friends did remark that from that date he evinced a marked dislike for the popular student song, ‘Come Follow’; and—on being present at a concert when the Glee Club performed that piece—he asked them to be good enough to desist.
GHOST STORY COMPETITION
M. R. James
Among the unrecorded pieces of M. R. James bibliography exists a long-forgotten and unique ghost story competition which was selected and judged by James at Christmas 1930 on behalf of The Spectator. One of the difficult rules of the competition specified that the entries should not exceed a thousand words, which meant that the leisurely build-up of Jamesian tales had to be forfeited in favour of a more speedy and pithy approach. From the large number of stories submitted, the dozen best ones were carefully read by James, and his interesting comments are here reprinted for the first time, together with the two entries which proved most successful in his opinion.
GHOST STORY COMPETITION
By Dr M. R. James
[We asked the Provost of Eton to select the best from a dozen of the large number of stories submitted to us. He comments on these and has chosen the one that our Editorial Staff had themselves considered to be the winner—‘Here He Lies Where He Longed to Be’ by Miss Winifred Galbraith, 44 Longton Grove, Sydenham, S.E. 26. Next week we hope to publish Dr James’s second choice.—Ed Spectator.]
The limitations of the space allowed to competitors, viz., ‘not exceeding a thousand words’, has inevitably cramped their style. I have always thought that one very desirable quality in a ghost story is leisureliness. Before now I have said it. The ghost story is essentially a somewhat old-fashioned thing; that is one of the reasons why Christmas time, which appeals to old association in so many ways, is considered the proper season for ghost stories. And in so far as the ghost story is old-fashioned, it ought to move at a pace suitable to its age. Such alarming features as it has, if they are to produce their one effect, must be introduced gradually. An explosion, as of a maroon, is often legitimate enough, but the reader must be put into the mood of expecting it. Hence I attribute great importance to the setting of such a story. I like, as I do in a detective novel, to make some sort of acquaintance with the actors. And, I would add, the more ordinary and normal both setting and actors are, the more effective will be the entangling of them in a dreadful situation, and the more ready will he who follows their adventures be to shake the head and murmur those words which I have long since registered as the proper ones for the reader of ghost stories, to wit, ‘If I’m not very careful, something like this may happen to me.’
Now it is clearly impossible for anyone so limited as are your competitors in point of space to fulfil the conditions I have laid down. The writer is forced to plunge in medias res. Still, he must have a setting and an environment to indicate, and a patient who must be characterized, as well as some being to operate upon that patient. The question is, who has managed these matters best among the twelve authors who have come before me?
I tabulate the settings and I find that three are connected with car-smashes, two with trains, one with France ancient, one with France modern, one with the War, one with a London house, one with a country house; one gives us a benevolent ancestral ghost; and the scene of one is set in China. The car, in spite of its terrific death-roll, is hardly the right vehicle for the peculiar horror we want in the Christmas ghost story. It moves too quick (much too quick for my liking) and runs the risk of a Grand Guignol effect. That is the fault of The Grin, and A Night’s Hospitality. One without title which tells of the Great North Road is better, but its point—a ghost who disbelieves in ghosts after having been one for a year—is too sophisticated.
Of the two train stories neither is quite coherent. I do not ask, heaven forbid! for a rigid sequence of cause and effect in a ghost story, but I do want some thread to tie the happenings together, though it should be guessed at rather than seen. In the Red Beard I do not get this: I cannot see what connexion can be supposed to exist between the man seen in the train and the wicked Baronet. The other, In the Fog, does connect the events together, but the catastrophe is wholly obscure (nor, though I may be very stupid, do I understand how that which was going on in the next compartment was seen reflected on the fog: does this happen?).
The revolution episode in The Return is of good quality: but if you are asking to be alarmed you will be disappointed. The other French scene, No Wine, etc., I cannot class as a ghost story. The ‘ghost’ was a living man. As to the War story, The Haunted Trench, one feels that almost anything might have happened in the War. It is the wrong setting to choose for a ghost story: you cannot make it more terrifying in that way.
In The Atmosphere That Stayed we find familiar ground, an evil home in St John’s Wood. Very right: but our ghost is too vague: were the story a ‘veridical’ account of an experience, communicated with proper credentials to the S.P.R., it would command the attention which it fails to rouse as fiction. The benevolent great grandmother in Old China does not stray out of an ordinary groove.