Ghosts
EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937) was born in New York City. Her father, George Jones, was a relative of the Joneses that fashionable people proverbially strive to keep up with; her mother, Lucretia Rhinelander, came from one of the city’s oldest families. Raised in New York and in Europe, Edith Jones was twenty-three when she married Edward Robbins Wharton (known as Teddy). In 1902 they built themselves a forty-two-room house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, but Teddy’s mental instability and financial irregularities led to a divorce in 1913, after which Edith moved to France, where she lived for the rest of her life. During the First World War, Wharton threw herself into war relief, traveling to the front lines and founding a charity for refugees, in recognition of which she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1916. Wharton published her first book, a collection of poems, in her teens and in 1897 achieved popular success as the co-author of The Decoration of Houses, a treatise on aesthetics and interior design. Her first volume of short stories, The Greater Inclination, came out in 1899. Among the most famous of her many novels are The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1912), The Custom of the Country (1913), and The Age of Innocence (1920), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first woman to do so. In addition to Ghosts, NYRB Classics publishes The New York Stories of Edith Wharton, edited by Roxana Robinson.
GHOSTS
EDITH WHARTON
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1937 by Edith Wharton
All rights reserved.
First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2021.
Cover image: Nojima Yasuzo, Tulips, 1940; photograph courtesy of the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wharton, Edith, 1862–1937 author.
Title: Ghosts : stories / by Edith Wharton.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2021] | Series: New York Review Books classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2020058370 (print) | LCCN 2020058371 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681375724 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375731 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Paranormal fiction. | LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS3545.H16 G55 2021 (print) | LCC PS3545.H16 (ebook) | DDC 813/.52—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058370
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020058371
ISBN 978-1-68137-573-1
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
CONTENTS
Cover
Biographical Note
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Dedication
Preface
All Souls’
The Eyes
Afterward
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
Kerfol
The Triumph of Night
Miss Mary Pask
Bewitched
Mr. Jones
Pomegranate Seed
A Bottle of Perrier
I entrust my spectral strap-hangers
in gratitude and admiration
to
Walter de la Mare
PREFACE
“Do you believe in ghosts?” is the pointless question often addressed by those who are incapable of feeling ghostly influences to—I will not say the ghost-seer, always a rare bird, but—the ghost-feeler, the person sensible of invisible currents of being in certain places and at certain hours.
The celebrated reply (I forget whose): “No, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m afraid of them,” is much more than the cheap paradox it seems to many. To “believe,” in that sense, is a conscious act of the intellect, and it is in the warm darkness of the pre-natal fluid far below our conscious reason that the faculty dwells with which we apprehend the ghosts we may not be endowed with the gift of seeing. This was oddly demonstrated the other day by the volume of ghost-stories collected from the papers of the late Lord Halifax by his son. The test of the value of each tale lay, to the collector’s mind, not in the least in its intrinsic interest, but in the fact that some one or other had been willing to vouch for the authenticity of the anecdote. No matter how dull, unoriginal and unimportant the tale—if some one had convinced the late Lord Halifax that it was “true,” that it “had really happened,” in it went; and can it be only by accident that the one story in this large collection which is even faintly striking and memorable is the one with an apologetic foot-note to the effect that the editor had not been able to trace it to its source?
Sources, as a matter of fact, are not what one needs in judging a ghost-story. The good ones bring with them the internal proof of their ghostliness; and no other evidence is needed. But since first I dabbled in the creating of ghost-stories I have made the depressing discovery that the faculty required for their enjoyment has become almost atrophied in modern man. No one ever expected a Latin to understand a ghost, or shiver over it; to do that, one must still have in one’s ears the hoarse music of the northern Urwald or the churning of dark seas on the outermost shores. But when I first began to read, and then to write, ghost-stories, I was conscious of a common medium between myself and my readers, of their meeting me half-way among the primeval shadows, and filling in the gaps in my narrative with sensations and divinations akin to my own.
I had curious evidence of the change when, two or three years ago, one of the tales in the present volume made its first curtsey in an American magazine. I believe most purveyors of fiction will agree with me that the readers who pour out on the author of the published book such floods of interrogatory ink pay little heed to the isolated tale in a magazine. The request to the author to reveal as many particulars as possible of his private life to his eager readers is seldom addressed to him till the scattered products of his pen have been collected in a volume. But when “Pomegranate Seed” (which I hope you presently mean to read) first appeared in a magazine I was bombarded by a host of enquirers anxious, in the first place, to know the meaning of the story’s title (in the dark ages of my childhood an acquaintance with classical fairy-lore was as much a part of our stock of knowledge as Grimm and Andersen), and secondly, to be told how a ghost could write a letter, or put it into a letter-box. These problems caused sleepless nights to many correspondents whose names seemed to indicate that they were recent arrivals from unhaunted lands. Need I say there was never a Welsh or a Scottish signature among them? But in a few years more perhaps there may be; for deep within us as the ghost-instinct lurks, I seem to see it being gradually atrophied by those two world-wide enemies of the imagination, the wireless and the cinema. To a generation for whom everything which used to nourish the imagination because it had to be won by an effort, and then slowly assimilated, is now served up cooked, seasoned and chopped into little bits, the creative faculty (for reading should be a creative act as well as writing) is rapidly withering, together with the power of sustained attention; and the world which used to be so grand à la clarté des lampes is diminishing in inverse ratio to the new means of spanning it; so that the more we add to its surface the smaller it becomes.
All this is very depressing to the ghost-story purveyor and his publisher; but in spite of adverse influences, and the conflicting attractions of the gangster, the introvert and the habitual drunkard, the ghost may hold his own a little longer in the hands of the experienced chronicler. What is most to be feared is that these seers should fail; for frailer than the ghost is the wand of his evoker, and more easily to be broken in the hard grind of modern speeding-up. Ghosts, to make themselves manifest, require two conditions abhorrent to the modern mind: silence and continuity. Mr. Osbert Sitwell informed us the other day that ghosts went out when electricity came in; but surely this is to misapprehend the nature of the ghostly. What drives ghosts away is not the aspidistra or the electric cooker; I can imagine them more wistfully haunting a mean house in a dull street than the battlemented castle with its boring stage properties. What the ghost really needs is not echoing passages and hidden doors behind tapestry, but only continuity and silence. For where a ghost has once appeared it seems to hanker to appear again; and it obviously prefers the silent hours, when at last the wireless has ceased to jazz. These hours, prophetically called “small,” are in fact continually growing smaller; and even if a few diviners keep their wands, the ghost may after all succumb first to the impossibility of finding standing-room in a roaring and discontinuous universe.
It would be tempting to dwell on what we shall lose when the wraith and the fetch are no more with us; but my purpose here is rather to celebrate those who have made them visible to us. For the ghost should never be allowed to forget that his only chance of survival is in the tales of those who have encountered him, whether actually or imaginatively—and perhaps preferably the latter. It is luckier for a ghost to be vividly imagined than dully “experienced”; and nobody knows better than a ghost how hard it is to put him or her into words shadowy yet transparent enough.
It is, in fact, not easy to write a ghost-story; and in timidly offering these attempts of mine I should like to put them under the protection of those who first stimulated me to make the experiment. The earliest, I believe, was Stevenson, with “Thrawn Janet” and “Markheim”; two remarkable ghost
stories, though far from the high level of such wizards as Sheridan Le Fanu and Fitz James O’Brien. I doubt if these have ever been surpassed, though Marion Crawford’s isolated effort, “The Upper Berth,” comes very near to the crawling horror of O’Brien’s “What Is It?”
For imaginative handling of the supernatural no one, to my mind, has touched Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw”; but I suppose a ghost-novel can hardly be classed among ghost-stories, and that tale in particular is too individual, too utterly different from any other attempt to catch the sense of the supernatural, to be pressed into the current categories.
As for the present day, I have ventured to put my own modest “omnibus” under the special protection of the only modern ghost-evoker whom I place in the first rank—and this dispenses with the need of saying why I put him there. Moreover, the more one thinks the question over, the more one perceives the impossibility of defining the effect of the supernatural. The Bostonian gentleman of the old school who said that his wife always made it a moral issue whether the mutton should be roast or boiled, summed up very happily the relation of Boston to the universe; but the “moral issue” question must not be allowed to enter into the estimating of a ghost-story. It must depend for its effect solely on what one might call its thermometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down one’s spine, it has done its job and done it well. But there is no fixed rule as to the means of producing this shiver, and many a tale that makes others turn cold leaves me at my normal temperature. The doctor who said there were no diseases but only patients would probably agree that there are no ghosts, but only tellers of ghost-stories, since what provides a shudder for one leaves another peacefully tepid. Therefore one ought, I am persuaded, simply to tell one’s ghostly adventures in the most unadorned language, and “leave the rest to Nature,” as the New York alderman said when, many years ago, it was proposed to import “a couple of gondolas” for the lake in the Central Park.
The only suggestion I can make is that the teller of supernatural tales should be well frightened in the telling; for if he is, he may perhaps communicate to his readers the sense of that strange something undreamt of in the philosophy of Horatio.
ALL SOULS’
Queer and inexplicable as the business was, on the surface it appeared fairly simple—at the time, at least; but with the passing of years, and owing to there not having been a single witness of what happened except Sara Clayburn herself, the stories about it have become so exaggerated, and often so ridiculously inaccurate, that it seems necessary that some one connected with the affair, though not actually present—I repeat that when it happened my cousin was (or thought she was) quite alone in her house—should record the few facts actually known.
In those days I was often at Whitegates (as the place had always been called)—I was there, in fact, not long before, and almost immediately after, the strange happenings of those thirty-six hours. Jim Clayburn and his widow were both my cousins, and because of that, and of my intimacy with them, both families think I am more likely than anybody else to be able to get at the facts, as far as they can be called facts, and as anybody can get at them. So I have written down, as clearly as I could, the gist of the various talks I had with cousin Sara, when she could be got to talk—it wasn’t often—about what occurred during that mysterious week-end.
•
I read the other day in a book by a fashionable essayist that ghosts went out when electric light came in. What nonsense! The writer, though he is fond of dabbling, in a literary way, in the supernatural, hasn’t even reached the threshold of his subject. As between turreted castles patrolled by headless victims with clanking chains, and the comfortable suburban house with a refrigerator and central heating where you feel, as soon as you’re in it, that there’s something wrong, give me the latter for sending a chill down the spine! And, by the way, haven’t you noticed that it’s generally not the high-strung and imaginative who see ghosts, but the calm matter-of-fact people who don’t believe in them, and are sure they wouldn’t mind if they did see one? Well, that was the case with Sara Clayburn and her house. The house, in spite of its age—it was built, I believe, about 1780—was open, airy, high-ceilinged, with electricity, central heating and all the modern appliances; and its mistress was—well, very much like her house. And, anyhow, this isn’t exactly a ghost-story, and I’ve dragged in the analogy only as a way of showing you what kind of woman my cousin was, and how unlikely it would have seemed that what happened at Whitegates should have happened just there—or to her.
•
When Jim Clayburn died the family all thought that, as the couple had no children, his widow would give up Whitegates and move either to New York or Boston—for being of good Colonial stock, with many relatives and friends, she would have found a place ready for her in either. But Sally Clayburn seldom did what other people expected, and in this case she did exactly the contrary: she stayed at Whitegates.
“What, turn my back on the old house—tear up all the family roots, and go and hang myself up in a birdcage flat in one of those new sky-scrapers in Lexington Avenue, with a bunch of chickweed and a cuttle-fish to replace my good Connecticut mutton? No, thank you. Here I belong, and here I stay till my executors hand the place over to Jim’s next of kin—that stupid fat Presley boy . . . Well, don’t let’s talk about him. But I tell you what—I’ll keep him out of here as long as I can.” And she did—for being still in the early fifties when her husband died, and a muscular, resolute figure of a woman, she was more than a match for the fat Presley boy, and attended his funeral a few years ago, in correct mourning, with a faint smile under her veil.
Whitegates was a pleasant hospitable-looking house, on a height overlooking the stately windings of the Connecticut river; but it was five or six miles from Norrington, the nearest town, and its situation would certainly have seemed remote and lonely to modern servants. Luckily, however, Sara Clayburn had inherited from her mother-in-law two or three old stand-bys who seemed as much a part of the family tradition as the roof they lived under; and I never heard of her having any trouble in her domestic arrangements.
The house, in Colonial days, had been four-square, with four spacious rooms on the ground-floor, an oak-floored hall dividing them, the usual kitchen-extension at the back, and a good attic under the roof. But Jim’s grand-parents, when interest in the “Colonial” began to revive, in the early ’eighties, had added two wings, at right angles to the south front, so that the old “circle” before the front door became a grassy court, enclosed on three sides, with a big elm in the middle. Thus the house was turned into a roomy dwelling, in which the last three generations of Clayburns had exercised a large hospitality; but the architect had respected the character of the old house, and the enlargement made it more comfortable without lessening its simplicity. There was a lot of land about it, and Jim Clayburn, like his fathers before him, farmed it, not without profit, and played a considerable and respected part in state politics. The Clayburns were always spoken of as a “good influence” in the county, and the townspeople were glad when they learned that Sara did not mean to desert the place—“though it must be lonesome, winters, living all alone up there atop of that hill,” they remarked as the days shortened, and the first snow began to pile up under the quadruple row of elms along the common.
Well, if I’ve given you a sufficiently clear idea of Whitegates and the Clayburns—who shared with their old house a sort of reassuring orderliness and dignity—I’ll efface myself, and tell the tale, not in my cousin’s words, for they were too confused and fragmentary, but as I built it up gradually out of her half-avowals and nervous reticences. If the thing happened at all—and I must leave you to judge of that—I think it must have happened in this way . . .
I
The morning had been bitter, with a driving sleet—though it was only the last day of October—but after lunch a watery sun showed for a while through banked-up woolly clouds, and tempted Sara Clayburn out. She was an energetic walker, and given, at that season, to tramping three or four miles along the valley road, and coming back by way of Shaker’s wood. She had made her usual round, and was following the main drive to the house when she overtook a plainly dressed woman walking in the same direction. If the scene had not been so lonely—the way to Whitegates at the end of an autumn day was not a frequented one—Mrs. Clayburn might not have paid any attention to the woman, for she was in no way noticeable; but when she caught up with the intruder my cousin was surprised to find that she was a stranger—for the mistress of Whitegates prided herself on knowing, at least by sight, most of her country neighbours. It was almost dark, and the woman’s face was hardly visible; but Mrs. Clayburn told me she recalled her as middle-aged, plain and rather pale.