Collected Ghost Stories (75 page)

6
a stupid missal of Plantin’s printing, about 1580
: a missal is a book containing the mass. Christoph Plantin (
c
. 1520–89) was a French printer and typographical pioneer, based in Antwerp from 1549. Publisher of numerous Bibles and other ecclesiastical works; best known for the
Biblia Polyglotta
(
Polyglot Bible
), 1569–72. MRJ visited the Musée Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp in April 1891, and examined ‘an early illuminated Sedalius 10th century’ (Cox II, 301). Joshi I (
p. 260
) asserts that Plantin was ‘a secret member of a heretical mystical sect’, whose works he published privately.

Alberic de Mauléon
: fictional, though characteristically embedded in layers of genuine factual information.

7
antiphoner
: a book containing antiphons, that is, ‘A versicle or sentence sung by one choir in response to another’ (
SOED
).

late in the seventeenth century
: ‘early in the xviiith century’ in MS.

Psalter
: a copy of the Psalms, for liturgical use.

uncial writing
: early Latin and Greek manuscript writing, comprised of large, rounded letters, not joined together.

Papias ‘On the Words of Our Lord’
: Papias (second century) was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia, Asia Minor (near modern Erzurum, Turkey).
On the Words of Our Lord
(often translated as
Explanation of the Sayings of the Lord
) now exists only in fragments, excerpted in the writings of Irenaeus and Eusebius (a severe critic), but is nevertheless considered an important account of the beginnings of the Church. In
The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts
(London: SPCK, 1919), MRJ writes: ‘It is almost a relief that catalogues [of ancient English libraries] do not tell us of supremely desirable things, such as Papias on the Oracles of the Lord or the complete Histories and Annals of Tacitus’ (
p. 76
).

8
in the north-west angle of the cloister was a cross drawn in gold paint
: the cloisters contain the tombs of many of the canons of St Bertrand. Intriguingly, the tomb at the north-west angle of the cloister is broken open.

Mr. Minor-Canon Quatremain in “Old St. Paul’s”
: a novel of 1841 by William Harrison Ainsworth, set during the London plague and fire of 1665–6. Minor Canon Thomas Quatremain believes he has discovered the location of buried treasure in Old St Paul’s Cathedral (destroyed by fire in 1666) by use of astrological divination.

a Biblical scene
: Cox suggests that the picture may echo Raphael’s cartoon
The Death of Ananias
, which is in the Victoria and Albert Museum (called the South Kensington Museum in the 1890s) (Cox II, 301). Julia Briggs (
Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story
(London,
1977), 130) speculates that the demon may be based on a crouching figure in Breughel’s
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
.

8
King Solomon
: according to the
Testament of Solomon
(written between the fifth and first centuries
BCE
), Solomon commanded a number of demons, including some obstructing the building of the Temple in Jerusalem, by means of a ring given to him by the archangel Michael. The
Testament
established Solomon’s reputation as a mage and an exorcist.

9
lecturer on morphology
: morphology is the science of biological form. This may be an oblique reference to Arthur Shipley, who had accompanied MRJ to St Bertrand in 1892, and was university lecturer on the advanced morphology of invertebrata at Cambridge from 1894 to 1908 (Cox II, 302).

10
Gehazi
: see 2 Kings 5. The prophet Elisha cures Naaman, captain of the Syrian host, of leprosy, and declines any payment for this. Gehazi, Elisha’s servant, follows after Naaman, to ‘take somewhat of him’, and is given two silver talents and two changes of garment. When Elisha discovers this, he curses Gehazi: ‘The leprosy therefore of Naaman shall cleave unto thee, and unto they seed forever. And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow.’

12
‘Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti’
: ‘Two times I have seen it; a thousand times I have felt it.’

13
Ecclesiasticus
: Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 39: 28: ‘There are winds that have been created for vengeance, and in their anger they scourge heavily’ (Revised Standard Version).

Isaiah
: see Isaiah 34: 13–14:

And thorns shall come up in her palaces, nettles and brambles in the fortresses thereof: and it shall be an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls.

The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow, and the screech-owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.

Wentworth Collection at Cambridge
: fictional version of the Fitzwilliam Museum, of which MRJ was curator.

Versicle
: ‘One of a series of short sentences, said or sung antiphonically in divine service;
spec
. one said by the officiant and followed by the RESPONSE of the congregation or people’ (
SOED
). See also the notes to
p. 7
:
Antiphoner
and
Psalter
.

Psalm: Whoso dwelleth (xci.)
: Psalm 91: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.’ See particularly verses 5–6:

Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day.

Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

‘Gallia Christiana’
: an encyclopedia of the bishops and abbots of France, first compiled by Claude Robert in 1626.

Sammarthani
: Dionysius Sammarthanus, or Denys de Sainte-Marthe (1650–1725), a Benedictine monk who began the revision of the
Gallia Christiana
in the early eighteenth century.

Composed between July 1892 (when MRJ visited St Michan’s church in Dublin) and October 1893, when it was read to the Chitchat Society along with ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. First published in the
Pall Mall Magazine
, 7/32 (December 1895), 639–47. Reprinted in
GSA
: ‘Lost Hearts’ was not originally intended as part of the volume, but was added by MRJ specifically in response to publisher Edward Arnold’s request, ‘Are there any more ghost stories? Those sent would only make a slim volume, and if there was half as much or as much again it would be a great advantage’ (KCL MS MRJ:D/Arnold). Published again in
CGS
. Manuscript in KCL MS MRJ:A/2.

14
Aswarby Hall, in the heart of Lincolnshire
: a real house, though not answering to MRJ’s description. Aswarby Hall, in the village of Aswarby, Lincolnshire, was originally a Tudor manor house, and was extensively modernized in 1836. It was demolished in 1951—only the entrance gates remain.

15
the Mysteries
: the Eleusinian Mysteries. Secret Greek rites taught by the goddess Demeter, who had lived disguised as a nurse in the home of King Celeus of the city of Eleusis, as recounted in the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter
. As initiation ceremonies into the cult of Demeter and Persephone, the Mysteries were enacted every year, and were considered the most important of all Classical rites.

the Orphic poems
: poems attributed to Orpheus, of which only two examples survive, the epic
Argonautica Orphica
(fifth–sixth century
BCE
) and a corpus of hymns (2–300
CE
). These works were supposedly recited as part of the Eleusinian Mysteries. See M. L. West,
The Orphic Poems
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Recalling a period of illness as a schoolboy in 1879, MRJ wrote, ‘I think the last straw was reading a lot of the Orphic Hymns (fifty of them) at a sitting’—but, he noted, ‘they taught me a good many words so I will not repent of my evil ways’ (Cox I, 33).

Mithras
: originally, an Iranian warrior deity, slayer of the sacred bull, from whose blood came all animals and plants useful to man. Mithraic religion, based like the Eleusinian Mysteries on initiation ceremonies, flourished particularly amongst the Roman legions, and was for a time the major rival to Christianity, which adopted a number of its beliefs and practices.

15
the Neo-Platonists
: modification of Platonic philosophy for the Roman world, most notably in the work of Plotinus (205–70). Very influential for Christian and Islamic theology until the Renaissance. Roden and Roden have plausibly argued that Mr Abney may in part be based on the Neoplatonic intellectual Thomas Taylor (1758–1835), translator of the Orphic poems (
The Mystical Initiations of Hymns of Orpheus
, 1787), and author of
A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries
(1791), and note that ‘a legend, surely apocryphal, persisted to the effect that Taylor had performed at his home a bloody sacrifice to the Ancient Gods’ (
PT
, 18).

Gentleman’s Magazine … Critical Museum
: the
Gentleman’s Magazine
was the first general periodical in England, a compendium of comment, opinion, news, and scholarship for the educated general reader. First published in London in 1731 by Edward Cave (‘Sylvanus Urban’), it ran until 1907. The
Critical Museum
is fictitious.

17
’urdy-gurdy
: a hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument played by turning a handle, particularly associated with European folk music.

St. Michan’s Church in Dublin
: seventeenth-century parish church in the Smithfield area of Dublin. The vaults contain the mummified remains of ‘four anonymous citizens of uncertain age—dried out, we are told, by the high tannic acid content of this once-forested marshy site’: Catherine Casey,
The Buildings of Ireland: Dublin
(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 241. MRJ visited St Michan’s in 1892, and found the vaults ‘horrid’ and their inhabitants ‘a nightmare’ (Cox I, 107). The MS version glosses St Michan’s vaults as ‘[famous for their preservative properties]’.

18
Censorinus
: Latin grammarian, third century; author of
De Die Natali
(
The Birthday Book
).

19
the rat that could speak
: Charles Dickens was one of MRJ’s favourite novelists, and this is a reference to Dickens’s story of Mr Chips, a shipwright who sells his soul to the Devil ‘for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak’, which offers a comic parallel to the Faustian themes of ‘Lost Hearts’. The story first appeared as part of the ‘Nurse’s Stories’ in
All the Year Round
(8 September 1760), and was reprinted in
The Uncommercial Traveller
(1861).

20
March 24, 1812
: MS has ‘the 24th of March 1811’—an obvious mistake as this is six months before Stephen arrives at Aswarby, though the MS repeats this date later in the story, and so it may be that the date in the opening sentence is the erroneous one.

22
Simon Magus … Clementine Recognitions
: another Faustian allusion. Simon Magus first appears in Acts 8: 9–24, as a Samaritan sorcerer who converts to Christianity, but then attempts to bribe the Apostles in exchange for being given the power of the Holy Ghost (hence ‘simony’, the traffic in sacred objects). Simon’s mythological afterlife, as a false
messiah and as the founder of post-Christian Gnosticism, is very rich. A number of Church Fathers identified him as the archetypal heretic, or even as the source of all heresies. The
Clementine Recognitions
, a narrative of the life of St Clement, bishop of Rome (first century), contains an account of Simon as a rogue disciple John the Baptist, who claimed to have been able to create life. This was a major source for the development of the Faust myth.

Hermes Trismegistus
: ‘Thrice Great Hermes’, a conflation of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth, both gods of writing and magic, and thus believed to be the source of Hermetic philosophy and religion, which emphasizes arcane or secret textual knowledge (of the kind possessed here by Mr Abney). According to some traditions, Hermes Trismegistus was a human mage.

twelve years: CGS
and Joshi I (
p. 23
) both read ‘twenty-one years’. This is a transcription of a mistake in the original MS, which reads ‘below the age of 21 years’, when it should obviously read ‘below the age of 12 years’, as Mr Abney’s insistence on knowing the precise date of Stephen’s twelfth birthday makes plain.