OLD MAN'S BEARD Read online

  Old Man’s Beard

  FIFTEEN DISTURBING TALES

  H. R. Wakefield

  OLD MAN’S BEARD

  ISBN: 9781553101383

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2011

  First bookform publication 1929

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1996

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume any responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © H. R. Wakefield

  Introductory material © Barbara Roden 2011

  Cover illustration © Paul Lowe 2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Barbara Roden

  Old Man’s Beard

  The Last to Leave

  The Cairn

  Present at the End

  ‘Look Up There!’

  ‘Written in Our Flesh’

  Blind Man’s Buff

  A Coincidence at Hunton

  Nurse’s Tale

  The Dune

  Unrehearsed

  A Jolly Surprise for Henri

  The Red Hand

  Surprise Item

  A Case of Mistaken Identity

  ‘A figure whose right of presence I instantly and passionately questioned.’

  The Turn of the Screw

  ‘Treat all supernatural beings with respect, but keep aloof from them—then you may be called wise.

  CONFUCIUS

  ‘I have heard, but not believed, the spirits of the dead may walk again.’

  . . . . . .

  . . . . . .

  . . . . . .

  (Exit, pursued by a bear).

  ANTIGONUS

  Old Man’s Beard

  Introduction

  WHEN H. R. WAKEFIELD’S first collection of supernatural stories, They Return at Evening, was published in 1928, it would not have been apparent to contemporary readers that the book marked the start of a new era. Wakefield’s appearance on the ghost story scene came at a time when many of the great names in the field were nearing the end of their careers as writers of supernatural fiction. M. R. James, E. F. Benson and Algernon Blackwood, who had dominated the field, had either published their last new stories or were within a few years of doing so (although Blackwood had a late fling with The Doll and One Other, published by Arkham House in 1946). They Return at Evening marked a turning point — away from the last century and on into a brave new world whose boundaries seemed limitless.

  They Return at Evening had been well-received, and the book’s success undoubtedly played a part in prompting its author to release a second collection, Old Man’s Beard (subtitled ‘Fifteen Disturbing Tales’) in April 1929. None of the stories in the collection seems to have seen separate publication prior to the book’s appearance, which leaves open the question of whether Wakefield wrote a series of supernatural tales during the 1920s and then consciously split them into two books, or whether the success of They Return at Evening encouraged him to have another crack at the genre. Certainly the consistently high quality of the majority of the stories in the first book suggests that they were not rushed in any way; like Mr Rhode, the writer of ghost stories in ‘The Red Hand’ (is the name a nod to Montague Rhodes James, one wonders), Wakefield appears to have been, as far as They Return at Evening is concerned, ‘a decent craftsman who never left a tale till he had tightened and trimmed and polished it to as near perfection as he could bring it’. The collection’s quality is attested to by the fact that, according to Mike Ashley and William Contento’s The Supernatural Index (Greenwood Press, 1995), eight of its ten stories have been used in anthologies of supernatural fiction over the last seven decades.

  Matters are somewhat different with Old Man’s Beard, however. Only three of the collection’s stories have been anthologised since its first publication: the title story, ‘Nurse’s Tale’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’. That this last should have been frequently reprinted is not surprising, as it is one of the finest stories Wakefield ever wrote, and one of the best ‘haunted house’ stories ever written; but one wonders why anthologisers have neglected ‘The Cairn’ and ‘ “Look Up There!” ’, two more stories which many a writer of ghostly tales would probably be glad to claim authorship of. Be that as it may, it still leaves us with the fact that, as far as anthologisers are concerned, Old Man’s Beard is not as successful a collection as its predecessor.

  If the second collection seems thinner (at least quality-wise) than the first, then it could be an argument for Wakefield’s having written all of the stories in They Return at Evening, and a few of the stories in Old Man’s Beard, prior to publication of the first book. Its success, and the possible pressure on him to produce a follow-up, may have led him to rush out a few more pieces to make up the numbers. ‘Surprise Item’ and ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’ both make reference to being set in 1926, while ‘Unrehearsed’ and ‘ “Look Up There!” ’ both take place in 1927; but it is impossible to know whether the stories were written at that time, or merely set then.

  * * * * *

  Wakefield, who was born in 1888, was the third of four children of Henry Russell Wakefield, Bishop of Birmingham from 1911–24. The eldest son, Howard (born 1882?) was in the Royal Navy, and little is known about him. Mary, the only daughter (born 1885?), married Captain (later Major-General) Edward Archibald Beck, and was the only one of the four to have children: Frances and Eirene. The youngest son, Gilbert, was born in 1892 and went on to become a noted playwright and the husband of actress Isabel Jeans.

  Until recently little was known about the family’s history. Wakefield had been a private man, and before his death in 1964 he had destroyed most of his personal papers. It was thought that no pictures of the author survived, apart from one grainy passport photograph which was made available to August Derleth, Wakefield’s American publisher, by the author’s widow (his second wife) for use on the dustwrapper of an Arkham House anthology containing a Wakefield story. However, it was recently learnt that Wakefield’s only surviving blood relative, his niece Eirene Beck, is still alive, and she was able to supply photographs of her uncle taken in the 1910s and 1920s. The pictures show a handsome man with matinée idol good looks; and, according to his niece, a beautiful speaking voice, an enormous amount of charm, and a good deal of potential as an actor had he decided to pursue that as a career. His younger brother Gilbert had said to her, ‘Herbert was brilliant—if the Brains Trust and those things had come in time for Herbert, he could have got onto the television — he was a brilliant talker.’ Through Gilbert, Herbert would have had an entrée to the world of the theatre, and he put this knowledge to use in the story ‘Unrehearsed’, with its details of theatrical superstition and goings-on behind stage.

  In 1920, following a lengthy tour of America with his father (during which time he served as the Bishop’s secretary), Wakefield met and married Barbara Stando Waldish, an American woman whose parents were wealthy. They settled in London, where Wakef
ield acted as a chief editor at Collins. His experience as a publisher provided the background for ‘The Last to Leave’, a surprisingly gentle tale from the pen of the usually sarcastic and biting Wakefield. Mr Arnott, the story’s main character, speaks fondly of the old building, condemned to be torn down, which his publishing firm is leaving after many years of happiness there; and it comes as little surprise to find that the tale is based, at least in part, on the experiences of Wakefield and a colleague which date back to his time at Collins. In ‘Why I Write Ghost Stories’, his introduction to the 1946 Arkham House edition of The Clock Strikes Twelve, Wakefield wrote:

  I once worked with a person of high intelligence and great curiosity about the world. We worked in one of the oldest and quietest buildings in London, since pulled down. He used to labour late when all the rest of the staff had gone. Quite frequently he heard footsteps going up and down the stairs. I know they did, because I heard them once, too — footsteps made by no visible human agency. I asked if they worried him. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘why should they? They appear to be harmless so far, and in any case, what can I do about it?’

  Another story in Old Man’s Beard that is quite different in tone from any of the others in the first two collections is ‘Present at the End’. It raises questions about the treatment of animals, particularly where blood sports are concerned, which are still being debated today. Prophetically, Wakefield has his main character Robert Benchley, a well-known sportsman who converts quite dramatically to the pro-animal camp, say at one point, ‘One day, it may be, to kill an animal for amusement will be considered an act of flagrant indecency, as serious an offence as wearing a white tie with a dinner jacket.’

  However, Wakefield’s concern with animals on the printed page did not always extend to his private life. His niece remembers that he used to torment a dog that his father owned by teasing it until the dog would bite and snap at him. She also remembers that during his marriage to Barbara the Wakefields had a cat named Omar, which Wakefield used to squirt with water from a soda siphon. This left an impression on the young girl, as did Wakefield’s telling her his ghost stories when she was quite young.

  Herbert was Eirene Beck’s godfather; but at her christening he forgot a mug which he had bought for her, and had to go and buy another. At the time of the publication of his first two books of short stories Wakefield, who often used to visit his sister Mary and her two daughters, would take the opportunity to sit on young Eirene’s bed (her sister Frances was much older than her) and tell her his ghost stories. He did not read them, but would act them from memory, and they proved quite memorable, especially ‘The Red Lodge’. ‘He was telling me these ghost stories which frightened the wits out of me,’ said Miss Beck, ‘and he shouldn’t have, you see, but he had a very sadistic streak.’ This streak manifested itself in his behaviour towards the family pets and towards his niece: he would sometimes pretend to choke her, or would hold her hands behind her back so she could not free herself. He did not, she felt, dislike children or animals; but he did have a cruel streak which would manifest itself in sadistic ways to those close to him.

  It has been tempting, in light of the lack of knowledge to the contrary, to speculate that Wakefield’s apparent dislike of women in his fiction stems from an unhappy first marriage. However, Eirene Beck said that the marriage between Barbara and Herbert was essentially a good one, although it had its difficult patches, fuelled by Wakefield’s drinking and his affairs with various Collins secretaries and authors; Miss Beck remembers quite clearly that her uncle once claimed he had two children, not Barbara’s, living in Australia. Whether or not this was merely a joke has never been discovered.

  Barbara, who was a nurse, ‘was very pretty and very smart,’ said Eirene Beck. ‘It was a stormy marriage because she was a rich American lady, very, very formal and deliberate — very good looking and very charming, but she was terribly deliberate.’ She also had a temper and a tough streak which enabled her to stand up to him, except where his drinking was concerned: when he was drunk, which was often, she would make excuses and cover up for him.

  He was undoubtedly a charming man, however, and women found him attractive. A friend who lived in a flat above Herbert and Barbara in London said that there was something fascinating about Herbert, and this was doubtless one of the factors that led Wakefield into a series of affairs with a number of women during the 1920s. Said Eirene Beck:

  ‘He had tremendous affairs with various people. Susan Ertz the writer was one of his girlfriends when he was at Collins, and he was very attractive to women. My father, who was very military but very broad-minded in many ways, said he was a shit, quite firmly — and I think he did have a lot of that in his character.’

  Given the affection that Wakefield is said to have had for Barbara, the series of affairs comes as something of a surprise. However, it seems possible that the same sadistic streak which led him to behave with some cruelty towards his niece and various family pets, when he in fact liked children and animals, led him into a series of affairs which would undoubtedly be hurtful to the wife of whom he was fond.

  Many of the stories in Old Man’s Beard feature unpleasant, if not outright cruel and sadistic, women, most of whom prey on hapless men who stray into their paths and whose overriding character fault is weakness. It is interesting to note that three of the four strongest stories in the collection — ‘The Cairn’, ‘Blind Man’s Buff’ and ‘ “Look up There!” ‘ — feature no significant female characters at all. Indeed, in ‘The Cairn’ the two main characters, Welland and Seebright, have such a close relationship with each other that it almost borders on the homosexual, and it is made clear that they have no time for the company of women:

  To have laid down his life for the other would have been considered a privilege by either of them. If the summons had come, neither of them would have hesitated for a moment. They had been the fastest, firmest friends for twenty years . . .

  Neither was ever quite happy when separated from the other . . . Their affection for each other so far surpassed the love of woman that had they been forced to face the conventionally considered ultimate tie of friendship by falling in love with the same one, they would have left her to celibacy or a third person with absolute contentment, in the certain knowledge that such a competition would have been essentially discordant and disgusting. Each secretly dreaded the possible marriage of the other . . .

  In ‘Old Man’s Beard’, another strong story, Wakefield’s treatment of Mariella and her mother is fairly restrained; he even manages a word of praise for Mrs Bickley, when he remarks that ‘she hid a very deep distress with heroic success and had become just the mother of a sick child’. However, there is something cruel, almost sadistic, in the prolonged ‘haunting’ of the innocent Mariella, which leaves rather an unpleasant taste; not even the fact that she recovers fully from her ordeal can make up for it.

  The male characters who feature in the various stories in the collection are treated, on the whole, with objectivity. There are no ‘evil’ men to compare with Oscar Clinton, Professor Pownall, or The Reverend Wellington Scot in They Return at Evening; any male characters who step off the straight and narrow, such as Arthur Randall in ‘Old Man’s Beard’, Bob Harriday in ‘A Coincidence at Hunton’ or (to a lesser extent) Amos Willans in ‘Surprise Item’, are presented as essentially decent men who succumb to a momentary weakness and rid the world of a person who (Wakefield implies) the world is really better off without. Randall and Willans murder because of a woman, while Harriday murders a woman, his fiancée: to Wakefield women, not the love of money, are the root of all evil.

  In ‘ “Written in Our Flesh” ’, one of the two non-supernatural tales in the book, Timothy Frone reflects on the women (or lack of same) in both his life and his recently-published novel, and reads a passage in which the heroine rejects the hero in terms which are, it appears, taken from the life:

  Harry dear, I love you in a way and I don’t love this other man, but I�
�m one of those women who can and must deliberately and in a way contentedly crush their sense of decency, the better but weaker side of them, to powder, if they are compelled to choose between a failure and a success. You aren’t and never could be a success . . . If you like I am a frigid, calculating, though, oh, so respectable prostitute! I am selling myself, but I know I am right to do so, for it is what my nature tells me I must do.

  After reading this to himself, Mr Frone wonders what Reginald Stall, the influential wireless broadcaster who is to review his book that evening, would think of the passage, and concludes (probably rightly), not a lot. The idea of woman as mercenary harpy, little better than a prostitute selling herself to the highest bidder, recurs in ‘The Dune’, in which Mr Parsley, while dozing on the beach, gets caught up in the thoughts and emotions of a man who drowned himself there several years before. Although no one knows exactly why he did it, Mr Parsley suspects it had to do with a woman, for while he is caught up in the other man’s mind, so to speak, he pictures the scene quite clearly:

  She had meant it. She did almost hate him. . . . He could remember just how she looked when she said, ‘You bore me, do you hear? You always have and always will bore me. I can’t say fairer than that!’ How that look she’d given him had seemed to break him. He hadn’t any money; that was it. . . . She was, he knew, an utterly soulless, mercenary little harpy. It was partly the humiliation of loving so desperately someone so despicable which tortured him. If she were a woman of intelligence and character he could have borne it far better. . . . What was it? What was this despicable craving for a tow-headed, scarlet-lipped, contemptible, shallow little pickpocket? An animal without a single animal virtue and every animal vice. . . . She was a pink-and-white envelope over a system of bones and muscles and fat; a collection of functions brutally mechanical. Whether such a functioning hide ever housed a soul was disputable; to suggest that hers did was a dirty joke. And her brain was such that it merely intensified the essential beastliness of her body. . . . Perhaps he was so rotten himself that it was her very vileness he adored.