Hugh Lamb - Ghosts in the House - Tales of Terror by A. C. Benson and R. H. Benson

‘Or you may take your stand upon the spiritual world, and use the faculties which God has given you for dealing with it, and then you will no longer be helplessly puzzled, and your intellect will no longer overstrain itself at a task for which it was never made. And you may say, I think, that you prefer one of two theories.

‘First, that human emotion has a power of influencing or saturating inanimate nature. Of course this is only the old familiar sacramental principle of all creation. The expressions of your face, for instance, caused by the shifting of the chemical particles of which it is composed, vary with your varying emotions. Thus we might say that the violent passions of hatred, anger, terror, remorse, of this poor murderer, seven hundred years ago, combined to make a potent spiritual fluid that bit so deep into the very place where it was all poured out, that under certain circumstances it is reproduced. A phonograph, for example, is a very coarse parallel, in which the vibrations of sound translate themselves first into terms of wax, and then re-emerge again as vibrations when certain conditions are fulfilled.

‘Or, secondly, you may be old-fashioned and simple, and say that by some law, vast and inexorable, beyond our perception, the personal spirit of the very man is chained to the place, and forced to expiate his sin again and again, year by year, by attempting to express his grief and to seek forgiveness, without the possibility of receiving it. Of course we do not know who he was; whether one of the knights who afterwards did receive absolution, which possibly was not ratified by God; or one of the men-at-arms who assisted, and who, as an anonymous chronicle says “ sine confessione et viatico subito rapti sunt .”

‘There is nothing materialistic, I think, in believing that spiritual beings may be bound to express themselves within limits of time and space; and that inanimate nature, as well as animate, may be the vehicles of the unseen. Arguments against such possibilities have surely, once for all, been silenced, for Christians at any rate, by the Incarnation and the Sacramental system, of which the whole principle is that the Infinite and Eternal did once, and does still, express Itself under forms of inanimate nature, in terms of time and space.

‘With regard to another point, perhaps I need not remind you that a thunderstorm broke over Canterbury on the day and hour of the actual murder of the Archbishop.’

It was five o’clock in the afternoon of an October day that Basil Netherby’s letter arrived. I remember that my little clock had just given its warning click, when the footsteps came to my door; and just as the clock began to strike, came a hesitating knock. I called out, ‘Come in,’ and after some fumbling with the handle there stepped into the room I think the shyest clergyman I have ever seen. He shook hands like an automaton, looking over his left shoulder; he would not sit down, and yet looked about the room, as he stood, as if wondering why the ordinary civility of a chair was not offered him; he spoke in a husky voice, out of which he endeavoured at intervals to cast some viscous obstruction by loud hawkings; and when, after one of these interludes, he caught my eye, he went a sudden pink in the face.

However, the letter got handed to me; and I gradually learnt from my visitor’s incoherent talk that it was from my friend Basil Netherby; and that he was well, remarkably well, quite a different man from what he had been when he came to Treheale; that he himself (Vyvyan was his name) was curate of St Sibby. Treheale was the name of the house where Mr Netherby lived. The letter had been most important, he thought, for Mr Netherby had asked him as he was going up to town to convey the letter himself and to deliver it without fail into Mr Ward’s own hands. He could not, however, account (here he turned away from me, and hummed, and beat his fingers on the table) for the extraordinary condition in which he was compelled to hand it to me, as it had never, so far as he knew, left his own pocket; and presently with a gasp Mr Vyvyan was gone, refusing all proffers of entertainment, and falling briskly down – to judge from the sounds which came to me – outside my door.

I, Leonard Ward, was then living in rooms in a little street out of Holborn – a poor place enough. I was an organist of St Bartholomew’s, Holborn; and I was trying to do what is described as getting up a connection in the teaching line. But it was slow work, and I must confess that my prospects did not appear to me very cheerful. However, I taught one of the Vicar’s little daughters, and a whole family, the children of a rich tradesman in a neighbouring street, the piano and singing, so that I contrived to struggle on.

Basil Netherby had been with me at the College of Music. His line was composing. He was a pleasant, retiring fellow, voluble enough and even rhetorical in tête-à-tête talk with an intimate; but dumb in company, with an odd streak of something – genius or eccentricity – about him which made him different from other men. We had drifted into an intimacy, and had indeed lodged together for some months. Netherby used to show me his works – mostly short studies – and though I used to think that they always rather oddly broke down in unexpected places, yet there was always an air of aiming high about them, an attempt to realise the ideal.

He left the College before I did, saying that he had learnt all he could learn and that now he must go quietly into the country somewhere and work alone – he should do no good otherwise. I heard from him fitfully. He was in Wales, in Devonshire, in Cornwall; and then some three months before the day on which I got the letter, the correspondence had ceased altogether; I did not know his address, and was always expecting to hear from him.

I took up the letter from the place where Mr Vyvyan had laid it down; it was a bulky envelope; and it was certainly true that, as Mr Vyvyan had said, the packet was in an extraordinary condition. One of the corners was torn off, with a ragged edge that looked like the nibbling of mice, and there were disagreeable stains both on the front and the back, so that I should have inferred that Mr Vyvyan’s pocket had been filled with raspberries – the theory, though improbable, did not appear impossible. But what surprised me most was that near each of the corners in front a rough cross of ink was drawn, and one at the back of the flap.

I had little doubt, however, that Mr Vyvyan had, in a nervous and absent mood, harried the poor letter into the condition in which I saw it, and that he had been unable to bring himself to confess to the maltreatment.

I tore the letter open – there fell out several pages of MS music, and a letter in which Basil, dating from Treheale, and writing in a bold firm hand – bolder and firmer, I thought, than of old – said that he had been making a good deal of progress and working very hard (which must account for his silence), and he ventured to enclose some of his last work which he hoped I would like, but he wanted a candid opinion. He added that he had got quarters at a delightful farmhouse, not far from Grampound. That was all.

Stay! That was not all. The letter finished on the third side; but, as I closed it, I saw written on the fourth page, very small, in a weak loose hand, and as if scribbled in a ferocious haste, as a man might write (so it came oddly into my head) who was escaped for a moment from the vigilance of a careful gaoler, a single sentence. ‘Vyvyan will take this; and for God’s sake, dear Leonard, if you would help a friend who is on the edge (I dare not say of what), come to me tomorrow, UNINVITED. You will think this very strange, but do not mind that – only come – unannounced , do you see …’