Collected Ghost Stories (78 page)

82
boots
: a servant responsible for cleaning shoes.

Belshazzar
: see Daniel 5 for the story of Belshazzar’s Feast. The Babylonian (Chaldean) king Belshazzar, son of Nebuchadnezzar, hosts an opulent feast, during which an invisible hand writes on the wall the words ‘
MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN
’, which no one can understand except the prophet Daniel, who interprets the words to mean ‘God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it…. Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting…. Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.’ That night, Belshazzar is killed; his kingdom is conquered by Darius the Median.

‘I ought to be able to make it out’
: understandably, there is some dispute as to what ‘
FUR FLA FLE BIS
’ means. ‘Fur Flabis Flebis’ can be translated as ‘Thief, you will blow, you will weep’; ‘Furbis Flabis Flebis’ as ‘You will blow, you will weep, you will go mad’. MRJ’s Eton tutor H. E. Luxmoore recalled hearing the story as ‘Fur flebis’ when it was read at Christmas 1903 along with ‘Number 13’ (Cox II, 312). It is probably safest to leave this as an ambiguous reference rather than commit to any one interpretation. The swastikas surrounding ‘
QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT
[
VENIT
]’ (‘Who is this who is coming?’) are in this context an ancient symbol prevalent in Eastern religions, though also adopted by Christianity.

84
Experto crede
: ‘Believe one who has experienced it’ (or ‘one who knows’).

86
‘like some great bourdon in a minster tower’
: a long-unidentified quotation, though given the story’s recurring interest in misquotation and ambiguous interpretation, it may well be invented (in which case, mischievously, MRJ himself would be the ‘minor poet’ here). A bourdon is the bass-stop of an organ.

87
cleek
: iron golf club.

88
Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle
: 21 December. St Thomas is famously, like Parkins, ‘doubting’, a rational materialist forced to confront the evidence of the supernatural when he sees the risen Christ.

Written in the summer of 1904, when MRJ was researching the stained glass at Ashridge Park. First published in
GSA
, and written specifically in response to publisher Edward Arnold’s request for more ghost stories to expand the collection to 60,000 words (KCL MS MRJ:D/Arnold). Reprinted in
CGS
. Eton College Library MS 365.

94
‘Sertum Steinfeldense Norbertinum’
: this is a fictional work by a fictional author, though the Premonstratensian abbey at Steinfeld (in the Eiffel
mountains, in the district of North Rhine-Westphalia in the far west of Germany) is real. In 1802, after its dissolution, the abbey’s sixteenth-century stained glass was removed and sold: some of it went to East Anglia, as the story suggests, while much of it was bought by Lord Brownlow for Ashridge Park, Hertfordshire, and is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1906, MRJ wrote a study of this,
Notes of Glass in Ashridge Chapel
, which he researched in July 1904: this is the ‘private chapel—no matter where’ mentioned later, and the story is obviously the product of the same research.

95
Job, John, and Zechariah
: initially ‘Solomon, John and Paul’ in MS.

Vulgate
: the Bible in Latin.

There is a place … hidden
: Job 28: 1: ‘there is … a place for gold where it is fined [refined]’, though here recast as ‘There is a place for gold where it is hidden’ [‘absconditur’].

96
sad perplexity
: the phrase is from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’:

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again.

There may be a parallel suggested here, very faintly, between Tintern and Steinfeld abbeys.

clerestory
: ‘The upper part of the nave, choir, and transepts of any large church, containing a series of windows, clear to the roofs of the aisles, admitting light to the central parts of the building’ (
SOED
).

Abbot Thomas von Eschenhausen
: fictional, though perhaps based on Abbot Johannes Trithemius (see note to
p. 103
); the earliest stained glass from Steinfeld does date from around 1520.

They have on their raiment a writing which no man knoweth
: a conflation of parts of two verses: Revelation 19: 16 (‘And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh, a name written …’) and Revelation 19: 12 (‘and he had a name written, which no man knew, but he himself’).

Upon one stone are seven eyes
: Zechariah 3: 9: ‘For behold the stone that I have laid before Joshua; upon one stone shall be seven eyes: behold, I will engrave the graving thereof, saith the
LORD
of hosts, and I will remove the iniquity of that land in one day.’

97
Parsbury
: fictional, but presumably intended to be in Hertfordshire.

Cobblince
: Koblenz, in the Rhineland, western Germany.

98
I have never visited Steinfeld myself
: MRJ’s
Notes of Glass in Ashridge Chapel
makes it clear that MRJ had never visited Steinfeld: ‘There is an account of Steinfeld in the Gallia Christiana, vol. III (Diocese of Cologne). I have not yet hit on any modern guide which will tell me whether there are any remains of it [the glass] at the present day’ (Cox II, 315).

101
Turk’s head broom
: a round-headed brush.

103
“Steganographia” … “Cryptographia” … “de Augmentis Scientiarium”
: the first two are landmark works in the history of cryptography and code. Johannes Trithemius (born Johann Heidenberg, 1462–1516), abbot of Sponheim (in the Rhineland, very near Koblenz), was reputed to be an occultist and black magician. His
Steganographia
(written 1499, published 1606), written in code, was long believed to be a work of black magic, though it is in fact a study of cryptography (‘steganography’ means ‘concealed writing’). ‘Cryptographia’ is the
Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae
(1624) by Gustavus Selenus, a pseudonym for Augustus the Younger (1579–1666), duke of Brunswick-Lüneberg in central Germany. Selenus also wrote an important study of chess,
Chess, or the King’s Game
(1616).
De Augmentis Scientiarum
(1623) is the expanded Latin version of Francis Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning
; volume vi contains a brief account of cryptography. Bacon devised a method of steganography which is still used, and still called the ‘Baconian cipher’.

104
Gare à qui la touche
: ‘Beware whoever touches it’. Originally part of the coronation ceremony of the Lombard kings: ‘Dieu me la donne, gare à qui la touche’ (‘God gives it [the Iron Crown of Lombardy] to me; beware whoever touches it’).

105
of Eliezer and Rebekah, and of Jacob opening the well for Rachel
: both stories featuring wells. In Genesis 24, Abraham sends Eliezer, his ‘eldest servant’, to find a wife for his son Isaac; Eliezer meets Rachel ‘by a well of water’ in the city of Nahor, Mesopotamia. In Genesis 29, Jacob meets Rachel at the well of Haran:

And he looked, and behold a well in the field, and, lo, there were three flocks lying by it; for out of that well they watered the flocks: and a great stone was upon the well’s mouth.

And thither were all the flocks gathered: and they rolled the stone from the well’s mouth, and watered the sheep, and put the stone again upon the well’s mouth in his place (Genesis 29: 2–3)

First read 28 December 1906; written for the students of King’s College Choir School. First published in
MGSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. KCL MS MRJ:A/5.

111
the Strand and Pearson’s
: two magazines, both established in the 1890s, and both specializing in popular fiction. Abridged versions of some of MRJ’s stories were published without his knowledge in
Pearson’s
in the 1930s. MS version reads ‘Now a days the
Strand
would be a large contributor.’

Berkeley Square
: 50 Berkeley Square, Mayfair: ‘the most haunted house in London’, whose residents included former prime minister George Canning;
now the home of Maggs Brothers antiquarian booksellers (who, interestingly, obtained the MRJ manuscripts for KCL). The house is the subject of a number of ghost stories, including Rhoda Broughton’s ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth’ (1868), where it appears as ‘32——Street, May Fair’. Caryl Brahms’s comic take on the legend,
No Nightingales
(1944), was filmed as
The Ghosts of Berkeley Square
(1947).

112
The school I mean was near London
: based on MRJ’s own preparatory school, Temple Grove, in East Sheen, Richmond, London, to which he went in 1873.

His name was Sampson
: this sentence not in MS, where his name is rendered variously as ‘Sampson’ and ‘Simpson’.

113
meminiscimus patri meo
: bad schoolboy Latin attempt at ‘I remember my father’.

First published in
MGSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. MS Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

118
Westfield Hall, in the county of Essex
: fictional, but obviously intended to lie somewhere between the Essex towns of Maldon and Chelmsford, which are about 5 miles apart.

122
a very odd disjointed sort of dream
: in
The Gothic Quest
(1939), Montague Summers wrote that ‘the late Dr M. R. James told me that one of his Ghost Stories—I am not sure which, but I rather fancy it might be
The Rose Garden
—was suggested to him by his recollection of a peculiarly vivid dream’ (Cox II, 318).

126
Roothing
: the Rodings, or Roothings, are a group of eight villages in Essex, a number of which contain distinctive Norman churches. The name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
Hroðingas
, named for their founder, Hroða. There is no village of Priors Roothing, though there is an Abbess Roding.
Fifth of November mask
: the fifth of November is Guy Fawkes’s Night, in which an effigy of Guy Fawkes is traditionally burned on a bonfire to commemorate the unsuccessful Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.

127
Sir————, Lord Chief Justice under Charles II
: probably Sir William Scroggs (1623–83), the Lord Chief Justice notorious for his savage conducting of the ‘Popish Plot’ trials of 1679–81 (see also note to
p. 40
), culminating in the trial and execution of Oliver Plunket, archbishop of Armagh, in 1681.

128
quieta non movere
: do not disturb quiet things—or, let sleeping dogs lie.

First published in
MGSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. KCL MS MRJ:A/6.

129
Piccadilly weepers
: long side whiskers, fashionable in the 1860s.

a certain famous library
: Cambridge University Library.

129
Talmud: Tractate Middoth … 1707
: the Talmud (Hebrew for study or learning) is a collection of Jewish commentaries and interpretative writings on oral and scriptural laws, comprising the Mishna (laws) and Gemara (commentary). The Middot (‘measurement’) is the tenth Mishnahic tractate of the Order of Kodashim (‘Holy Things’), the Fifth Order of the Mishna, dealing with the religious ceremony of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Middot itself describes the measurements of the Second Temple of Jerusalem. Nachmanides, or Nahmanides, was the pseudonym of the Catalan rabbi and sage Moses Ben Nahman (1194–1270), a celebrated commentator on the Talmud—although the specific volume referred to here may be fictional.

137
Dundreary
: Lord Dundreary, a character in Tom Taylor’s hit play
Our American Cousin
(1858), sported a spectacular set of Piccadilly weepers.

139
a track
: that is, ‘Trac.’, the abbreviated form of Tractate.