Collected Ghost Stories (80 page)

Mr. Dolben
: William Dolben (
c
. 1627–94); judge, celebrated (or notorious) for presiding over the trials of many of those implicated in the Popish Plot, including Oliver Plunket.

185
‘Madam, will you walk, will you talk with me?’
: the refrain of a popular English folk song, which closes with the lines: ‘Thou shalt give me the keys of my heart, | And we shall be married till death do us part.’ For the song, its history and melody, see Lucy Broadwood and J. A. Fuller Maitland,
English County Songs
(London: Leadenhall Press, 1893), who note that ‘In many [versions] the lady’s cupidity is at last excited by some especially magnificent offer, and, on her consenting, the man refuses to have anything to do with her.’ This is the conclusion which seems likely to underlie the events of ‘Martin’s Close’.

Tyburn
: near Marble Arch, London; a site of executions until the eighteenth century. The notorious ‘Tyburn Tree’ was a triple gallows for the execution of multiple felons.

195
St. Augustine de cura pro mortuis gerenda
: ‘On care to be had for the dead’, a treatise on funerary rites, written
c
. 421 by St Augustine of Hippo (354–430).

Mr. Lang’s books
: Andrew Lang (1844–1912), prolific Scottish folklorist and man of letters; one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research; author of numerous high-profile books on the supernatural, including
Cock Lane and Common Sense
(1894).

196
North Tawton
: Devon, very near to Sampford Courtenay.

First published in
MGSA
: in the Preface to
CGS
, MRJ claims that the story ‘was written to fill up the volume’. Reprinted in
CGS
. Eton College Library MS 366. In a letter of 3 January 1912 to his friend Arthur Hort, MRJ explained his conception of the story:

As far as I can give it the explanation is this. That old Mr Wilson who made the maze had remained in the globe with his ashes, quiescent as long as the gate was not opened. When they opened it and laid out the clue, and left the gate open, he woke up and came out. It was he who was mistaken on two successive nights for an Irish yew and a growth against the house wall, and on the last evening he made himself visible to his descendant creeping up as it were out of unknown depths and emerging at the appropriate spot—the centre of the plan of the maze. (Cox II, 324)

KCL MS MRJ A/11 is a draft of a story that features a protagonist called ‘John Humphreys’ who inherits a property; it has a few small, circumstantial parallels with ‘Mr Humphreys’ (most notably its reference to an Irish yew, which recurs here), though it is essentially a different story. The fragment is reproduced in
PT
, 429–39, under the title ‘John Humphreys’.

197
Wilsthorpe
: a village in the southern part of Lincolnshire, very near the Norfolk border. Its branch-line railway station was built in 1860.

change of propriety
: the first of Mr Cooper’s many malapropisms; he means ‘change of proprietorship’.

201
valentudinarian
: valetudinarian; hypochondriac.

‘the golden bowl gradually ceasing to vibrate’
: Ecclesiastes 12: 6–7:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel be broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

202
dolebat se dolere non posse
: ‘grieved that he could not grieve’.

203
meatear … signosier
: métier (calling); cynosure (centre of attention, guiding star).

203
horse doover
: a conflation of
hors de combat
(out of action) with an over-literal translation of
hors d’œuvre
(out of work).

Handel’s ‘Susanna’
: oratorio by George Frideric Handel (catalogue no. HWV 66), composed 1748. The libretto is probably by the Irish librettist Newburgh Hamilton. The quotation slightly misremembers the Second Elder’s lines in 111.i.61: ‘Far to the west direct your straining eyes, | Where yon tall holm tree darts into the skies.’

204
‘Secretum meum mihi et filiis domus meae’
: ‘My secret is for me and the sons of my house’. Martin Hughes suggests that this may be ‘A paraphrase of Isaiah 24: 16 (Vulgate):
secretum meum mihi secretum mihi vae mihi
(“I have my secret, I have my secret, woe is me”)’: ‘A Maze of Secrets in a Story by M. R. James’,
Durham University Journal
, 85:54/1 (January 1993), 81–93.

205
A stone column about four feet high, and on the top of it a metal globe
: Pardoe and Nicholls suggest that ‘MRJ may have got the idea of a globe in a maze from the ancient turf maze at Hilton, near Cambridge, which has a stone globe on a pedestal in the middle’ (
PT
, 596).

unannealed
: ‘unaneled’ means ‘Not having received extreme unction [ie, the Last Rites]’ (
SOED
). Whilst this cannot be what Mr Cooper intends, it is nevertheless relevant to the story’s concerns with mortality and funeral rites.

angels fearing to tread
: ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’: Alexander Pope,
An Essay on Criticism
(1711), l. 625.

208
catalogue raisonné
: descriptive catalogue.

Picart’s Religious Ceremonies … the Harleian Miscellany … Tostatus Abulensis … Pineda on Job
: Bernard Picart (1673–1733) was a French engraver best known for his
Cérémonies et costumes de tous les peoples du monde
(10 vols., 1723–43).
The Harleian Miscellany
(1744–6) contained selections from the library of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford (1689–1741).
Tostatus Abulensis
: Alonso Fernandez de Madrigal (
c
. 1400–55), known as Alonso Tostado. Bishop of Avila and prolific biblical exegete. John de Pineda (1558–1637), Spanish Jesuit theologian and exegete;
Commentariorum in Job Libri Tredecim
(1597–1601).

like Theseus, in the Attick Tale
: the tale of Theseus, who slew the Minotaur in the Labyrinth of Knossos, and thus helped free Attica (that part of Greece containing Athens) from the bondage of King Minos.

209
Quid multa?
: ‘What more?’, or ‘Need I say more?’

210
a Hound at Fault
: a hound which has lost the scent of its prey.

211
tentacles
: tenterhooks.

213
princeps tenebrarum
: ‘the Prince of Darkness’; the Devil.

umbra mortis
: the shadow of death.

vallis filiorum Hinnom
: ‘the valley of the sons of Hinnom’, or Gehenna. A valley near Jerusalem, the site of the altar of Tophet at which children
were burned in sacrifice to the fire-god Moloch (2 Kings 23: 10). Gehenna became synonymous with hell, a place of fiery torment.

Cain … Chore … Ophiuchus … Absolon
: Cain slew his brother Abel and was exiled, anathematized, to the Land of Nod to the East of Eden (Genesis 4: 1–17). Chore, or Core, is a variant spelling of Korah, the son of Izhar, who led a rebellion against Moses. The rebels were punished by being swallowed by the earth (Numbers 16: 1–35), in a manner clearly resonant for the thematic concerns of ‘Mr Humphreys’. Ophiuchus, ‘The Snake Holder’, is a constellation of stars. Absalom (Absolon) was the favourite son of King David, who led a rebellion against his father, and is slain by Joab at the battle of the Woods of Ephraim, after getting tangled ‘in the thick boughs of a great oak’ (2 Samuel 13–19). Cain, Korah, and Absalom are linked here as doomed rebels, or as those who set themselves against the word of God.

Hostanes magus
: Hostanes was the legendary mage of the Persian emperor Xerxes I (486–465
BCE
). According to the
Octavius
of Marcus Minucius Felix (second–third century), Hostanes was ‘The foremost of these Magi both in eloquence and art…. The same Hostanes also has told us of earthly demons, wandering spirits, the enemies of mankind.’
The Fathers of the Church: Tertullian, Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix, Octavius
, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, Emily Joseph Daly, and Edward A. Quain (New York: Catholic University of America, 1950), 379.

214
in statu quo
: Mr Cooper means that he sleeps practically naked. This is probably a malapropic rendering of
in flagrante delicto
—literally ‘in a blazing wrong’, and usually translated idiomatically as ‘caught red-handed’; it is likely that Cooper is alluding to its connection with sexual impropriety, ‘to be caught in the act’, ‘in a compromising position’.

220
‘P
ENETRANS AD INTERIORA MORTIS
’
: ‘Penetrating to the inner places of death’; from Proverbs 7: 27 (Vulgate): ‘viae inferi domus eius penetrantes interiora mortis’; ‘Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death’.

Covent Gardens … Hampton Court
: In his first example, Mr Calton is mistaken: there is no maze at Covent Garden (in central London), though Inigo Jones’s great piazza is at the centre of a warren of streets. Hampton Court has the most famous of all English mazes, constructed between 1689 and 1695 for William I by George London and Henry Wise.

First published in
TG
; reprinted in
CGS
. MS not located.

221
Whitminster
: fictitious, though there is coincidentally a village with this name in Gloucestershire. Cathedral staff who live in the cathedral close are referred to as being ‘in residence’.

223
Earl of Kildonan
: fictitious Irish title.

223
raths
: a rath is an Irish term, originally meaning a hill fort, and common as a prefix to place names.

224
Æsculapius
: Roman god of medicine (deriving from his Greek counterpart Asclepius).

225
Radamistus
: Rhadamistus, an Iberian prince, ruler of Armenia (
CE
51–5). An episode in Tacitus’
Annals
(12.51) in which Rhadamistus stabs his pregnant wife Zenobia and commits her body to the river Araxes rather than surrender her to enemy forces (an event which she miraculously survives) provided a popular basis for operas. Handel was a particular favourite of MRJ, and it seems likely that his
Radamisto
(1720, with a libretto by Nicola Francesco Haym) is being alluded to here, though Pietro Metastasio’s libretto
Zenobia
was twice set to music (by Giovanni Bononcini in 1737 and J. A. Hasse in 1761). Fittingly, given this story’s Irish resonances, the Irish dramatist Arthur Murphy’s
Zenobia: A Tragedy
was performed in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1796.

226
Cleodora and Antigenes
: Cleodora may refer to the nymph Kleodora, who saw the future by means of throwing pebbles (which would link with the story’s theme of supernatural divination), or to one of the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaüs, betrothed to the fifty sons of Aegyptus, who, on the command of their father, each (except for one, Hypermnestra) beheaded their husbands on their wedding nights. William Smith’s
Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology
(1870) lists numerous Antigenes, including four separate doctors, which might be intended as an allusive echo of Aesculapius (see note to
p. 224
), though given the reference in the sentence to ‘battles’, this Antigenes seems most likely to be Alexander the Great’s general, burned alive by his enemy Antigonus in 316
BCE
. The reference in both cases seems to be to shockingly violent murders.

229
Monte Cristo’s mansion at Auteuil
: in Alexandre Dumas’s
The Count of Monte Cristo
(1844), the hero Edmond Dantès resides in Auteuil, now in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris.

The Talisman
: 1825 novel by Sir Walter Scott, the second of his ‘Tales of the Crusaders’. The talisman of the title has miraculous curative powers, which Saladin, disguised as a physician, uses to cure the ailing Richard the Lionheart.