Three stories by Mary Webb (1881-1927)

Readers unfamiliar with the fiction of Mary Webb may prefer to read these notes only after reading the stories. 

"The Name-Tree" (1921) [from Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain] is a story from an arch age of sublimated emotions and succulent subtexts.

[....] that brooding place—that place where mists lingered and melodies sounded, and man wrestled with the spirit of earth.

Laura, living in genteel poverty with her father on their ancestral property Cherry Orchard, is beset by attentions of a newcomer to the area, magnate and landowner Julius Winter. Cherry Orchard is to be sold, and Winter makes it clear to her that he will accept either possession of the property or Laura herself. "Your love should be given to a man. Such passion as yours should bear fruit."

The worldly man obsesses over the unworldly woman.

[....] He had not thought passion of just that quality existed in the modern world. Certainly the women he had known had not possessed it. This woman had it, and she wasted it on a place. He watched her, standing slim and gauche in her old brown dress, her soul tormented by love for something vague and mysterious, something he could not touch or name, that seemed to lie beneath the earthly beauty that she saw, like a dreaming god. Desire surged over him—the poignant longing that jonquils bring, the longing to touch the silken petals, to gather the brittle, faintly-scented stalks.

Winter's ultimatum: "I'll come for your answer this day next week, Laura. If it's no, you and your father will go at once."

The fruit of Laura's name-tree, a Morello, does ripen, and she makes her decision.

"The Name-Tree" is a story the contemporary reader might find too distanced in tone. Still, struggles over class privilege and exploitation predominate; new-money Julius slips easily into an older patriarchal role, adding emotional piquancy to questions of buying and selling, rites and rights.

[....] The trees brooded over them like jewelled birds in some ancient tapestry. They filled him with an ache of longing. He wanted to possess them, as a god might. He would possess them in her.

Laura, in contrast, is "as fond of the nettles as of the cowslips." The value for her of ancient family property lies in continuity, not title. "I'd as lief think of selling myself" as selling Cherry Orchard, she assures herself. 

And that is exactly what Winter will demand.  

*   *   *

"Mr. Tallent's Ghost" (1926) [The Virago Book of Ghost Stories] is a droll tale of haunting, similar in tone to E. F. Benson's more tongue-in-cheek work. 

The narrator, a solicitor, meets Mr. Tallent on a rainy day during a mountain vacation. Fighting boredom, he agrees to listen to one of the man's unpublished pieces of fiction. Agonies of miserable boredom ensue. Years later, after Tallent's death, the narrator must carry out his final wish:  spend the estate's small fortune arranging publication of a boxful of the amateur author's horrible stories. A dozen of Tallent's financially hopeless relatives dispute this use of the estate. A legal free-for-all ensues, and all parties delaying publication are haunted at night by the author himself, reciting his manuscripts out loud. Webb excels here in the multiple peripeteias of a dispute that seems capable of rivaling Jarndyce v Jarndyce, until non-spectral reality provides its own punchline. 

*   *   *

"The Sword" (1934) [in The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2003: Ghosts at 'The Cornhill' 1931-1939] is a poignant short story about "loving honor more" than happiness and romantic contentment. Its macabre subtext is carefully husbanded. Richard Gledd is prone to staring off in the distance, "his homeless eyes [looking] across the gaiety into the dark night beyond." Comrades in arms during the Great War noted his "sense of the deep, icy integrity which lay in his soul like a sheathed sword and made him as absolute, omnipotent, terrible, and beautiful as a god."

He rejects all appropriate marriage prospects. 

His friends said of him that he was the man who perpetually enquired for the goods that were not in the shop, not anywhere in the world…. Not one of the flower-soft, bird-voiced, gazelle-eyed girls he met could call him home.

Webb returns to home, homeless, and homing several times in "The Sword." When Gledd finally meets the woman he has sought, the reader at first assumes she too is a homeless, unattached soul. 

The final scene is quickly executed. The unbending authority of Gledd's aroused disapproval calls up a preternatural manifestation keen as any drawn blade.

*   *   *

Mary Webb was a successful author in her lifetime. Women's social predicaments were at the forefront in her bestsellers, as they are in two stories discussed above. Both Laura in "The Name-Tree" and Eucharis in "The Sword" face marriage as an ultimatum. Laura bests her suitor, thwarting him for the first time. Eucharis is not so lucky: giving up her "second-best life" for the answered prayers of marriage turns out to be a mistake, around which others precipitate. 

[....] as his look settled upon her there was in it the same icy, fiery dreadfulness that had been in it once when he court-martialled a man for robbing the wounded. Steely, unpitying, his eyes forced hers to look at him. No word was spoken….

As a contrast, "Mr. Tallent's Ghost" is filled with no such gravitas. I wrote above that it recalled E. F. Benson's lighter stories. But more than that, it brings to mind Saki's unrest-cure stories, wherein hard-working middle class people are pulled backward through a thorny hedgerow of topsy-turvy at the hands of Clovis. Only by a hair's breadth is Tallent's executor permitted a happy ending.

Mary Webb seeds these stories with quotidian miseries. But as each story unfolds, the everyday is amalgamated and complicated by something still stranger. Whether melodrama, farce, or tragedy, the strangeness itself lingers when everyday unhappiness is temporarily dispelled.

Jay

31 March 2023

"The China Bowl" by E. F. Benson (1916)

"The China Bowl" (1916) by E. F. Benson is a shocker: no one is better than Benson at showing a man succeeding in finding and moving into a suitable house, and then being dropped into nightmare. It's the wholesome and prosaic bourgeois circumstances that prepare the reader for the "pleasing terror" hurrying on its way.

No. 29 Barrett's Square, Benson's protagonist soon learns, has recently seen a death: the wife of the present lessee, Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite.

"'There is so much here…. that is very intimately bound up with me....'" Bassenthwaite tells the narrator as they tour the rooms.

Then, in the watches of the night:

....I had been so engrossed in my work that I had let the fire go out, and myself get hungry, and went into the dining-room, which opened into the little back-garden, to see if the fire still smouldered there, and a biscuit could be found in the cupboard. In both respects I was in luck, and whilst eating and warming myself, I suddenly thought I heard a step on the tiled walk in the garden outside.

     I quickly went to the window and drew aside the thick curtain, letting all the light in the room pour out into the garden, and there, beyond doubt, was a man bending over one of the beds.

     Startled by this illumination, he rose, and without looking 'round, ran to the end of the little yard and, with surprising agility, vaulted on to the top of the wall and disappeared.

     But at the last second, as he sat silhouetted there, I saw his face in the shaded light of a gas-lamp outside, and, to my indescribable astonishment, I recognized Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite. The glimpse was instantaneous, but I was sure I was not mistaken, any more than I had been mistaken about the light which came from the bedroom that looked out on to the square.

     But whatever tender associations Sir Arthur had with the garden that had once been his, it was not seemly that he should adopt such means of indulging them. Moreover, where Sir Arthur might so easily come, there, too, might others whose intentions were less concerned with sentiment than with burglary.

     In any case, I did not choose that my garden should have such easy access from outside, and next morning I ordered a pretty stiff barrier of iron spikes to be erected along the outer wall. If Sir Arthur wished to muse in the garden, I should be delighted to give him permission, as, indeed, he must have known from the cordiality which I was sure I showed him when he called, but this method of his seemed to me irregular. And I observed next evening, without any regret at all, that my order had been promptly executed. At the same time I felt an invincible curiosity to know for certain if it was merely for the sake of a solitary midnight vigil that he had come.

A few days later, the narrator is joined by an overnight guest: Hugh Grainger, expert on ghosts and murder.

They decide to spend the night in the late Mrs. Bassenthwaite's room.

             'I say, I'm feeling fairly beastly,' [Hugh] said, 'and yet there's nothing to see or hear.'

     'Same with me,' said I.

     'Do you mind if I turn up the light a minute, and have a look 'round?' he asked.

     'Not a bit.'

     He fumbled at the switch, the room leapt into light, and he sat up in bed frowning. Everything was quite as usual, the bookcase, the chairs, on one of which he had thrown his clothes; there was nothing that differentiated this room from hundreds of others where the occupants lay quietly sleeping.

     'It's queer,' he said, and switched off the light again.

     There is nothing harder than to measure time in the dark, but I do not think it was long that I lay there with the sense of nightmare growing momentarily on me before he spoke again in an odd, cracked voice.

     'It's coming,' he said....

Like the image of Sir Arthur Bassenthwaite bounding at night over the garden wall, that simple phrase 'It's coming' raised more gooseflesh in this reader than anything I have read or viewed in the last two months.

Jay

7 June 2022

Hide their name: The Wishing-Well by E.F. Benson

"These wishing-wells," he said, "are common to the whole of early European beliefs, but nowhere do we find that the power which supposedly presided over them was at the beck and call of any chance persons who invoked their efficacy. Only witches and those who had occult powers could set the spell working, and the origin of that spell was undoubtedly Satanic, and not till Christian times were these wells used for any purpose but that of invoking evil. The form of these wells is curiously similar; an arch or shelter of stonework is invariably built over them, and in the sides are cut small niches where, in Christian days, candles were placed or thank-offerings deposited. What they were previously used for is uncertain, but they were beyond doubt connected with the evil spells, and I conjecture that the name of the person devoted to destruction was scratched on a coin, or written on a slip of linen or paper, to await the action of the diabolical power. The most perfectly preserved of these wishing-wells known to me, is that of St. Gervase in Cornwall; its arched shelter is in excellent condition, and the well, as is usual, very deep. The local belief in its efficacy has survived to this day, though its power is never invoked, as far as I can ascertain, for evil purposes. A woman in pregnancy, for instance, will drink of the well and pray beside it, a girl whose lover has gone to sea will scratch her name on a silver coin and drop it into the water, thus insuring his safe return. The village folk are curiously reticent about such practices, but I can personally vouch for cases of this kind...."

*

I have been reading the E.F. Benson story collection Sea Mist (Ash Tree Press 2005).

I'll probably post a few comments on each story when I am done with the fiction portion of the book. But I wanted to make special mention of the story "The Wishing-Well."  It takes place in the village of St. Gervase on the northern coast of Cornwall.

Here 40 year old Judith keeps house and assists her father, the Reverend Lionel Eusters, in his church work and his study of occult folkways. Judith is of, yet not of, the community.

Her budding romantic desires are thwarted by her status as a "spinster." She is drawn to the authority of two local witches to resolve her crisis: the recently buried crone Sally, and the much more powerful Mrs. Penarth.

It's an acute story that reminds me, in its handling of the predicament of a woman thwarted in her development, of Hardy's "The Withered Arm." Not quite as hopeless as that, though!  This is E.F. Benson, after all.

Jay

June 1 2017