THEY RETURN AT EVENING Read online

  They Return

  at Evening

  A BOOK OF GHOST STORIES

  H. R. Wakefield

  THEY RETURN AT EVENING

  ISBN: 9781553101369

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2011

  First bookform publication 1928

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1995

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © H. R. Wakefield

  Introductory material © Barbara Roden 2011

  Cover illustration © Paul Lowe 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Barbara Roden

  That Dieth Not

  Or Persons Unknown

  ‘He Cometh and He Passeth by!’

  Professor Pownall’s Oversight

  The Third Coach

  The Red Lodge

  ‘And He Shall Sing . . .’

  The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster

  A Peg On Which To Hang——

  An Echo

  They Return at Evening

  Introduction

  M. R. James is the greatest master of the ghost story. Henry James, Sheridan Le Fanu and H. Russell Wakefield are equal seconds.

  John Betjeman

  H. R. Wakefield, in They Return at Evening (a good title) gives us a mixed bag, from which I should remove one or two that leave a nasty taste. Among the residue are some admirable pieces, very inventive.

  M. R. James

  THE NAME OF H. R. WAKEFIELD is known to even the most casual of ghost story readers through tales such as `The Red Lodge', '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"', and 'The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster', which are staples of ghost story anthologies. Yet only one collection of Wakefield's ghost stories has been published in Great Britain since 1940 (The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield, 1978, edited by Richard Dalby), and his final collection of weird tales, Strayers from Sheol (Arkham House, 1961) has never been published in his own country. In her study of the genre, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (1977), Julia Briggs manages only one mention of Wakefield, and even then gets her information wrong: she calls his first collection They Walk at Night.

  Such neglect places Wakefield in distinguished company: E. G. Swain, R. H. Malden, A. N. L. Munby, and L. T. C. Rolt are all authors of fine collections of ghost stories, which for many years after their publication were not easily available, and consequently more talked-about than read by ghost story enthusiasts. Wakefield, however, differs from the others in that he wrote several collections of weird tales, over a period of thirty-three years — Messrs Swain, Malden, Munby, and Rolt wrote one collection each — and Wakefield was far the best known of them all. That his first two collections of ghost stories, They Return at Evening (1928) and Old Man's Beard (1929; U.S. title Others Who Returned) have not been reprinted since is little short of a crime, albeit one that may be partly explained by the popularity of the two anthologies (Ghost Stories, 1932, and A Ghostly Company, 1935) which were published by Jonathan Cape in their Florin Books series, and which used many of the best stories from Wakefield's first three collections.

  Little is known about Wakefield's life, as he avoided publicity during his lifetime and destroyed many of his private papers and manuscripts shortly before his death in 1964. The only known photograph of him which survives is a passport photograph, which Wakefield's widow supplied to August Derleth in 1969 for use in Thirty Years of Arkham House (1970).

  * * * * *

  Herbert Russell Wakefield was born near Folkestone, Kent in 1888 (although even his year of birth has been the subject of some debate). His father, Henry Russell Wakefield, was to become Bishop of Birmingham, and young Wakefield was educated at Marlborough and Oxford. He was an athletic boy, good at games, and was a lifelong enthusiast of golf. He obtained a degree in Modern History from Oxford, and in 1911 became Lord Northcliffe's personal private secretary. In 1914 Wakefield joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers, and served on the Western Front and in Macedonia, eventually attaining the rank of Captain.

  In 1920 he married Barbara Standish Waldo, an American whose wealthy parents took a house in London each summer. During the 1920s he worked in publishing, but gradually spent more and more of his time writing. In 1928 came his first literary successes: Gallimaufry, a light-hearted novel, and They Return at Evening, a collection of nine supernatural tales.

  They Return at Evening was well-received, both in England and America, and was a Book of the Month Club Recommendation in the latter country. The book's success is hardly surprising, containing as it does several first-rate stories to which any writer of supernatural fiction would be proud to lay claim. Naturally enough, Wakefield found himself inheriting the mantle of M. R. James, whose output of ghostly fiction was almost at an end by 1928.

  It is not difficult to understand why Wakefield's stories were so quickly labelled as being in James's style. Publishers have a natural inclination to compare an author to someone who has successfully gone before, and Wakefield is not the only (and probably not the first) author to have his stories described as being 'in the style of M. R. James'. Wakefield's stories are, however, very much in their own style — there is no indication of pastiche or conscious imitation here — but there are certainly similarities between the two. Both men set their tales in the world they knew: a world of middle and upper-middle class gentlemen (many, if not most, of whom are bachelors), who either have independent incomes or whose occupations are genteel rather than manual; a world of superior butlers and their gentlemen; a world of clubs in the city and houses in the country: a world which has, for the most part, disappeared, and which gives Wakefield's (and James's) stories a pleasant glow of nostalgia when read several decades after they were written.

  James felt that ghost stories should be set in a time and place not too far removed from the reader's own experience, and Wakefield upheld this dictum even more than James. His stories are all of their time, and, as a consequence, we find Charlie Chaplin films and cars doing eighty miles an hour in 'That Dieth Not', and martinis and heroin in '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"': an almost resolute modernity that James seldom, if ever, attempted. References to boot-leggers, gold-diggers, and James Elroy Flecker (a popular poet in the 1920s, but almost completely forgotten today) would have made Wakefield's stories more modern than James's to contemporary readers, and it is therefore ironic that James's stories have worn better: their lack of reference to contemporary events has given them a timeless feel, whereas Wakefield's stories, in many ways, are very much of their age.

  The reader approaching They Return at Evening expecting 'Jamesian' stories, in the truest sense of that expression, is likely to be disappointed: the stories display a distinct lack of hapless antiquarians, cathedral closes, old manuscripts, and Latin and Biblical quotat
ions. Wakefield's similarity to James is more to do with the style of their stories than with their plots: their work shares a matter-of-factness when dealing with the supernatural, an economy of words, a sense of humour, and a way of combining the supernatural with the mundane. That is not to say that Wakefield did not write Jamesian stories on occasion: 'The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster' must rank as one of the most Jamesian ghost stories ever written, complete with a smattering of pastiche (from The Memoirs of Simon Tylor, 1839) to serve as an explanation of sorts just when the reader thought that the mysterious events would remain unsolved. In this instance the pastiche itself is not, perhaps, quite up to James's standard, but it rounds off the story nicely, giving enough of an explanation to satisfy most readers, but not so much that it dots every 'i' or crosses every 't'. Wakefield's story itself spawned an imitation: L. T. C. Rolt acknowledged that his own story, 'New Corner' (in Sleep No More), was written in conscious imitation of 'The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster'.

  Wakefield himself based one of the stories in They Return at Evening on a James story: '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"' is a recognisable variation of 'Casting the Runes', with Oscar Clinton (one of the 'Naughty Boys of the Nineties') being a direct descendant of Mr Karswell (and the all-too-real Aleister Crowley). The plots of the stories are similar: a practitioner of the Black Arts uses his power to eliminate those who have crossed him, by means of sending them a small slip of paper on which is printed mysterious characters. Death follows in due course, caused by something hideous and only half-glimpsed; Wakefield shows his mastery of the telling phrase when one victim describes the creature as a shadow, which comes 'even when it ought to be too light for shadows'.

  Bellamy, the victim's barrister-friend, determines to avenge his friend's death, and begins to study the mysterious Mr Clinton. He ingratiates himself with Clinton, winning over his trust, although this course of action is repugnant to him — Clinton is an unsavoury character who boasts of his lifestyle and makes no attempt to hide his contempt for morality:

  'I fancy,' said Clinton, 'that you are perplexed by the obstinate humidity of my left eye. It is caused by the rather heavy injection of heroin I took this afternoon . . . But tell me — since you profess such an admiration for my books — which of them most meets with your approval?'

  'That's a hard question,' remarked Bellamy, 'but A Damsel with a Dulcimer seems to me exquisite.'

  Clinton smiled patronisingly.

  'It has merits,' he said, 'but is immature. I wrote it when I was living with a Bedouin woman aged fourteen in Tunis. Bedouin women have certain natural gifts' — and here he became remarkably obscene, before returning to the subject of his works; 'my own opinion is that I reached my zenith in The Songs of Hamdonna. Hamdonna was a delightful companion, the fruit of the raptures of an Italian gentleman and a Persian lady. She had the most naturally — the most brilliantly vicious mind of any woman I ever met. She required hardly any training. But she was unfaithful to me, and died soon after.'

  It is impossible to imagine James writing such a passage, yet it succeeds as effectively as the scene in 'Casting the Runes' in which Karswell's slide-show for the village children is described. Both scenes establish, accurately and with great economy, the characters of the two villains, and hint at something deep and monstrous beneath the surface. 'But she was unfaithful to me, and died soon after'; simple but chilling.

  'The Red Lodge' is probably the best-known story in the collection, and was inspired by a visit Wakefield paid to a house near Richmond Bridge in 1917. The house had an evil reputation, and while there Wakefield felt himself 'oppressed by a fear without a name'. One day, while out in the garden, he glanced up at a row of windows on the first floor and saw 'a blurred face at one of them. It was a man's face, but there was no man in the house'.

  The story itself is not Jamesian, but it moves the reader along in the brisk manner of James: before the first paragraph — even the first line — is finished, we know that the Red Lodge is an evil house, and there is scarcely a word wasted as we are carried along by the events of the story. Wakefield takes a fairly mundane plot — a family taking a house for the summer — and proceeds to furnish it with more than enough frightening moments to fill several stories. Consider the moment when the hero, knowing he is alone in his study, feels he is being watched:

  Time after time I found myself peeping into dark corners and shifting my position. And there were little sharp sounds; just the oak-panelling cracking, I supposed. After a time I became more absorbed in the book, and less fidgety, and then I heard a very soft cough just behind me. I felt little icy rays pour down and through me, but I would not look round, and I would go on reading. I had just reached the following passage . . . when my eye was caught by a green patch which suddenly appeared on the floor beside me, and then another and another, following a straight line towards the door. I picked up the nearest one, and it was a bit of soaking slime.

  It is almost impossible to fault the story in any way: perhaps it should be used as a textbook example for aspiring ghost story writers. It is all the more amazing that this accomplished, assured, and elegant performance was one of Wakefield's first ghost stories. Probably not since M. R. James cleared his throat one evening in October 1893 and began reading 'Canon Alberic's Scrap-book' at a meeting of the Chitchat Society has a more auspicious debut been made in the field of the supernatural story.

  Wakefield also managed, in 'The Red Lodge', to rein in one of his most unpleasant characteristics as a writer: the misogynistic outbursts that appear in several stories, often apropos of nothing. Mary, the wife of the narrator of 'The Red Lodge', is presented as a sympathetic, sensible woman: writes her husband, 'I am very fond of my wife — she slaved for me when I was poor, and always had kept me happy, comfortable, and faithful, and she gave me my small son Timothy.' This is, for Wakefield, the equivalent of a love poem: women in his stories seldom escape with a kind word, a tone set in the first tale, 'That Dieth Not', which features the monstrous Ethel (who is 'highly intelligent in a debased feminine way'). The narrator goes on to comment that 'Once I had been fool enough to regard women as mentally almost indistinguishable, and it had been merely by the physical criterion I had separated one from another in my mind'. Ethel's opposite, the saintly Margaret Pascal, with whom the narrator falls in love, is almost too good to be true; for Wakefield, it seems, there was very little in between the two extremes of womanhood.

  The stories are littered with examples of his almost casual misogyny. 'The man of superior power — there are no such women——' says Clinton in '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"'; while in 'Professor Pownall's Oversight' the professor remarks, 'Women do not exist for me — they are merely variants from a bad model', adding a few paragraphs later, 'If one avoids all contact with women one can live marvellously cheaply: I am continuously astounded at men's inability to grasp this great and simple truth.' The narrator of 'The Third Coach', reflecting on his (female) partner-in-crime's intention to leave him for an honest life, decides that he would like to fling her into a cell full of drunken stokers. Mr Partridge, in 'A Peg On Which To Hang', spends an extremely unpleasant night because of the greed of the landlord's wife; and in 'An Echo', the only women to be seen are gold-diggers, trying their best to ensnare the wealthy if dim-witted Richard Eagles.

  This last story is perhaps the weakest in the collection, and was doubtless inspired by Wakefield's own love of mystery stories. He was himself the author of two books about real-life crimes and also wrote three detective novels, and his love of the genre is apparent throughout his supernatural tales. 'That Dieth Not', with its narrator confessing at the start that he murdered his wife, is really an inverted mystery story, a form that was to be made famous in 1931 when Francis Iles wrote his classic novel Malice Aforethought. 'Or Persons Unknown' works as a locked-room murder mystery, while '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"' contains a reference to the detective stories of R. Austin Freeman, as well as a club which meets to discuss famous mysteries of t
he past.

  Comedy in ghost stories needs to be handled carefully, lest it should overshadow the supernatural goings-on; but at the same time, a touch of humour at the right moment can heighten the terror by lulling the reader into a false sense of security. Wakefield's sense of humour, and his skill at choosing the appropriate moment for that humour to appear, is as evident as his love of mysteries. This passage, from '"He Cometh and He Passeth By!"', helps defuse the tension after Bellamy has seen his friend killed, but before he begins the task of tracking down and destroying Clinton:

  Mr Plank, Bellamy's clerk, had no superior in his profession . . . Not one of the devious and manifold tricks of his trade was unpractised by him, and his income was £1,250 per annum, a fact which the Inland Revenue Authorities strongly suspected but were quite unable to establish. He liked Mr Bellamy, personally well enough, financially very much indeed. It was not surprising, therefore, that many seismic recording instruments registered sharp shocks at four p.m. on June 12th, 192-, a disturbance caused by the precipitous descent of Mr Plank's jaw when Mr Bellamy instructed him to accept no more briefs for the next three months. 'But,' continued that gentleman, 'here is a cheque which will, I trust, reconcile you to the fact.'

  Mr Plank scrutinised the numerals and was reconciled.