Hugh Lamb – Ghosts in the House: Tales of Terror by A. C. Benson and R. H. Benson (страница 3)

Arthur’s published ghost stories were written to entertain his pupils, and collected into book form later. One of his Eton pupils, E.H. Ryle, has described a typical Benson reading:

We used to assemble in his dark and deserted study … exactly at the appointed moment [Benson] would emerge from his writing room … He would turn up the light in a green-shaded reading lamp on a little table, bury himself in his great, deep armchair … and then, in a low, conversational tone of voice, he would narrate an absorbing tale. I loved those Sunday evenings. The darkened room, the little pool of light … a silence which could be felt, the blurred outline of the huddled-up figure of the big man, the quiet, even flow of words …

Considering the still sharp scenes of terror in some of those stories, that ‘low, conversational tone’ of Benson must have caused quite a few nightmares! These stories for his pupils were collected into two volumes, The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1905).

Another book of A.C. Benson stories had quite a different origin. When Arthur joined in James’s reading sessions, he would contribute one or two himself. We know of at least one by name, ‘The House at Trehele’, which Benson read out in 1903. When Arthur died, E.F. Benson went through his papers and came across a file of ghost stories. He quite liked the look of two of them and duly got them published by one of his own publishers, Hutchinson, in January 1927 (under the dreadfully nondescript title Basil Netherby, which might explain the volume’s neglect since). The title story was a renamed ‘The House at Trehele’. There is no record of what happened to the others.

Arthur Benson suffered from extraordinary dreams all his life, extraordinary both in their content and the clarity with which he recalled them, and described some in his diary. He dreamed of an execution: ‘A man with an axe cut pretty deep into [Lord Morton’s] neck. I saw into the cut, it was like a currant tart.’ Then he had this vision some years later:

… a terrible dream of the hanging of some person nearly related to me at Eton; the scaffold, draped with black, stood in Brewer’s Yard; and I can’t describe the speechless horror with which I watched little black swing-doors in it push open at intervals, and faces look out. The last scene was very terrible … the prisoner stood close to me … I could see his face twitch and grow suddenly pale. When the long prayers were over, he got up and ran to the scaffold, as if glad to be gone. He was pulled in at one of the swing-doors – and there was a silence. Then a thing like a black semaphore went down on the top of the scaffold – (which was nothing but a great tall thing entirely covered with black cloth) – and loud thumps and kicks were heard inside, against the boards, which made me feel sick.

There is an odd little essay by Benson in his book Escape (1915) which merits a mention. In ‘The Visitant’ he tells of a recurring vision of a house and its occupants. He can see them and the rooms with great clarity, but is unable to see past some doors or into the hall or passage. It is not sinister in itself but it does bear an uncanny resemblance to the recurring dream in E.F. Benson’s ‘The Room in the Tower’. Fred was not averse to the occasional lifting of his brother’s material, as with The Luck of the Vails.

E.H. Ryle recalled that ‘shortly after its publication in 1903 I started to read The Luck of the Vails, by E.F. Benson, my Tutor’s brother. I wondered why it seemed familiar, and then it flashed upon me that the story, no doubt in a less elaborate form, had been spun out to us on the ten or eleven Sunday evenings of (I think) the winter half of 1899–1900. I imagine that A.C.B., after realising the pleasure it had given to a youthful audience, passed on the plot to E.F.B. – but I write subject to correction.’

It would seem that Arthur Benson wrote no more ghost stories for publication that we know of. He did write a mildly interesting novel, The Child of the Dawn (1912), dealing loosely with reincarnation. Its significance here lies in its introducing, in the midst of the hero’s wanderings in the afterlife, the unnamed figure of Herbert Tatham, a fellow ghost story writer of Benson, and his greatest friend, who had died in 1909, and to whom the novel was dedicated. According to Hugh Macnaghten, Eton Vice-Provost at the time of Arthur’s death, Herbert Tatham suggested the plot of ‘The Gray Cat’ to Benson.

It was Arthur’s ‘pupil’ stories that inspired Hugh Benson to try his luck at ghost story writing, albeit of a much more different sort. He records that he started writing the stories in The Light Invisible (1903) in the summer of 1902 and that they were of a semi-mystical and imaginative nature. They were that all right, but more besides. Purporting to be the narratives of an old priest and the writer himself, the fifteen tales vary wildly from genuinely creepy stories, such as ‘The Traveller’, to quite unpalatable religious maunderings. One story, which I have not included here, invites us to witness a spiritual being pushing a child under a horse and cart as evidence of God’s love for humanity. If Benson’s religious convictions led him in this direction, we can only be grateful he never wrote any more stories for that volume.

The book was nonetheless a huge success, being reprinted nine times within four years of its first appearance in March 1903. Hugh’s religious leanings deprived him of the enormous royalties that flowed from all this. At the time he wrote and published the book, he was a member of the Community of the Resurrection, a religious order based near Bradford. As such, he was obliged to donate to the order all his worldly goods – book royalties and all!

His other book of ghost stories, A Mirror of Shalott (1907), was a different kettle of fish altogether. It was the book form of a set of stories he had published over the years in the Ecclesiastical Review and the Catholic Fireside, which purported to be stories told by a group of priests in Rome. Stronger than the earlier book, A Mirror of Shalott suffers in large part from a bit too much Catholicism, but makes up for it with some genuinely scary tales. ‘Father Meuron’s Story’ is an old favourite with editors, and ‘My Own Tale’ is not without reprinting over the years, but in the main, the stories used here should be refreshingly unfamiliar.

His only other essay in the supernatural is the novel The Necromancers (1909), an openly stated warning against the dangers of Spiritualism, which has been reprinted in paperback in the past forty years. I think it is also the only piece of work by A.C. or R.H. Benson to be dramatised in any form: it was filmed in 1940 under the title Spellbound, directed by John Harlow and featuring Derek Farr and Vera Lindsay. The film has also been titled Passing Clouds and The Spell of Amy Nugent.

Hugh Benson was also interested in real-life hauntings, as shown by his article ‘Haunted Houses’, written for the Pall Mall Magazine, January 1913. He takes the view that it would be foolish to ignore what he calls the ‘overwhelming’ weight of human evidence for haunted houses; an eminently satisfactory attitude for a ghost story writer. The article has not been reprinted since it first appeared, and makes an interesting counterpoint to Hugh Benson’s fictional ghost stories.

It is surprising that the E.F. Benson revival of the past thirty years has not sparked interest in the work of his brothers. All three were best sellers and all three wrote equally interesting ghost stories (though perhaps not equally entertaining). I hope this selection from Arthur Benson and Robert Hugh Benson will help restore them to their rightful place in the history of the English ghost story.

Hugh Lamb

Sutton, Surrey

January 2018

OUT OF THE SEA

A.C. Benson

It was about ten of the clock on a November morning in the little village of Blea-on-the-Sands. The hamlet was made up of some thirty houses, which clustered together on a low rising ground. The place was very poor, but some old merchant of bygone days had built in a pious mood a large church, which was now too great for the needs of the place; the nave had been unroofed in a heavy gale, and there was no money to repair it, so that it had fallen to decay, and the tower was joined to the choir by roofless walls. This was a sore trial to the old priest, Father Thomas, who had grown grey there; but he had no art in gathering money, which he asked for in a shamefaced way; and the vicarage was a poor one, hardly enough for the old man’s needs. So the church lay desolate.

The village stood on what must once have been an island; the little river Reddy, which runs down to the sea, there forking into two channels on the landward side; towards the sea the ground was bare, full of sand-hills covered with a short grass. Towards the land was a small wood of gnarled trees, the boughs of which were all brushed smooth by the gales; looking landward there was the green flat, in which the river ran, rising into low hills; hardly a house was visible save one or two lonely farms; two or three church towers rose above the hills at a long distance away. Indeed Blea was much cut off from the world; there was a bridge over the stream on the west side, but over the other channel was no bridge, so that to fare eastward it was requisite to go in a boat. To seaward there were wide sands, when the tide was out; when it was in, it came up nearly to the end of the village street. The people were mostly fishermen, but there were a few farmers and labourers; the boats of the fishermen lay to the east side of the village, near the river channel which gave some draught of water; and the channel was marked out by big black stakes and posts that straggled out over the sands, like awkward leaning figures, to the sea’s brim.