OLD MAN'S BEARD Page 2
This incident causes Mr Parsley to re-assess his mostly female workforce when he returns to his factory. He pictures the women going forth to conquer and torture men, and catches the eye of one of the workers: a tow-haired, scarlet-lipped young woman, who Mr Parsley promptly sacks, for no other reason, it seems, than that she is a woman. The situation gets worse in ‘A Jolly Surprise for Henri’, in which the main character, Marianna Painter, is an attractive American woman who decides that she needs to operate on a larger stage than her small hometown affords. She finds the youth of her town intolerable, and so flirts with them cruelly: ‘Because they boosted Tickville she despised them, and it amused her to torture them.’ When the opportunity to marry a wealthy Englishman some years her senior arises she seizes it, then embarks on a series of relationships (which she is careful to keep strictly platonic) with various men:
She encouraged all the more socially eligible with a rather stereotyped and highly deceptive response. She knew all the tricks of the trade, but there was no real business done. . . . Whenever the pursuer’s chase became too hot she pretended to surrender to her lord and master’s will, but while the affair was in an early, safe and interesting condition she defied him with perfect success. . . . she had no intention of giving Oliver any real excuse for taking any unpleasant action. He might rage, but there was nothing definite of which he could accuse her.
Why did Marianna dally? She was perfectly happy, constitutionally frigid, and she knew dalliance was dangerous. Partly from that malevolent and morbid delight in torturing men. It gave her a queer and complex thrill to see them ‘aching’ for her. Never having experienced such an urge herself she found it most amusing to watch it in others, and men behaved in interestingly different ways when properly adjusted to the rack. Marianna’s dalliances, and her attitude towards men, are dwelt on at length in this story; so much so that the intrusion of a slight supernatural element at the end seems almost an afterthought: as if Wakefield realised, almost too late, that there had to be some point to the tale besides the castigation of his heroine. There is slightly more supernatural content in ‘Surprise Item’, but the main female character comes in for even more excoriation. A radio broadcast has been interrupted by the strange rantings of an unidentified man, who is apparently trapped in a room of his house and is being prevented from leaving by a man who he claims is dead. It is apparent that a women is at the base of the problem:
All on account of that little slut! As if I was the first — twenty-first more like! . . .
That hot little piece! Always hanging round. She got what was coming to her. I wasn’t the first, she told me that. Nor second, nor third. If he got that sort, it’s his business if she gets into trouble. And then threatening me, asking me what I was going to do about it! Well, I showed him what I was going to do about it . . .
Old Willans, the inadvertent broadcaster, seems to have been having an affair with a ‘notorious young person, extremely promiscuous in her “love” affairs’, whom he has made pregnant. The tone of the story seems to make clear where Wakefield’s sympathies lie: not with the woman who has been made pregnant, and who, not unreasonably, asks the father of the child what he will do, but with Old Willans, who was not averse to playing the field himself, and who resorts to murder when it suits his plans.
This catalogue of nasty females is hardly exhaustive: I have not mentioned the calculating Dorothea Cannon of ‘A Case of Mistaken Identity’ or Brenda Vandelaar of ‘A Coincidence at Hunton’, who determines to buy the best-looking man in the district and then proceeds to flaunt him like a prize possession. And then there is this extraordinary passage in ‘The Dune’:
It suggested animosity; it seemed frigidly hostile, yet in a way tempting; something which inevitably carried one away and swallowed one up, however fiercely one strove against it. Something which clutched and killed — and yet invited. . . . Why not accept that invitation? Why not run down, plunge in, forget . . .
Mr Parsley is talking about the ocean: but the use of words like ‘frigid’ and ‘tempting’, and the image of something that swallows one up, despite one’s best efforts, is reminiscent of women, at least in Wakefield’s world, where men are shown to be blameless but weak, and where women are constantly on the prowl, ready to lead men on with the promise of something exciting and enticing, only to turn on them at the last moment, showing themselves to be essentially frigid and cruel. If his marriage to Barbara was basically a happy one, as it appears to have been, then it is intriguing to wonder from where these demons arose, and whether they prompted, or were caused by, his affairs during the 1920s.
* * * * *
There are, misogyny notwithstanding, some excellent stories in Old Man’s Beard. Perhaps the most exceptional are ‘The Cairn’, ‘ “Look Up There!” ’ and ‘Blind Man’s Buff’. In these three tales, Wakefield eschews any kind of explanation for the terrifying goings-on, letting the tales finish just at the point where a more conventional writer would be settling down to tie up the loose ends. In this he anticipated modern authors such as Robert Aickman, whose supernatural tales often lack conventional explanations and endings.
‘The Cairn’ is faintly suggestive of E. F. Benson’s ‘The Horror Horn’, first published in 1922, which concerns a monstrous, Yeti-like creature in the Swiss Alps which pursues the unfortunate narrator when he is unlucky enough to stumble across the animal during a snowstorm. Early in the story, the narrator and a friend discuss ‘a pamphlet concerning the result of the Mount Everest expedition’, in which the climbers report that they thought they came across the imprint of a naked human foot in the snow at a great altitude.
Although tales about the Yeti, or ‘Abominable Snowman’, are well known today, they would certainly have been new in the 1920s, at least to the western world. Natives of the Himalayas had known stories about the Yeti for centuries, but it was not until the arrival of the high mountaineers that western interest in the Yeti was aroused; not so much because the mountaineers were out to look for the mysterious creature, but because there was an enormous amount of interest in their exploits, which were duly reported in great detail.
The first Everest Reconnaissance Expedition, in 1921, was led by Lieutenant-Colonel C. K. Howard-Bury. In his report, Howard-Bury wrote:
Even at these heights [between 20,000 and 21,000 feet] we came across tracks in the snow. We were able to pick out tracks of hares and foxes, but one that at first looked like a human foot puzzled us considerably. Our coolies at once jumped to the conclusion that this must be ‘The Wild Man of the Snows’, to which they gave the name of Metoh-kangmi, the Abominable Snowman who interested the newspapers so much. . . . These tracks . . . were probably caused by a large ‘loping’ grey wolf, which in the soft snow formed double tracks rather like those of a barefooted man. Tibet, however, is not the only country where there exists a bogey man. In Tibet he takes the form of a hairy man who lives in the snows . . . To escape from him [one] must run down the hill, as then his long hair falls over his eyes and he is unable to see . . .
In 1925 (too late to influence Benson’s story, but certainly a possible influence for Wakefield) came an account by N. A. Tombazi, a British photographer of excellent reputation, who had seen something in the region of the Zemu Glacier at an altitude of 15,000 feet. The figure he saw, at a distance of about 300 yards, was like that of a human, walking upright and wearing no clothes. During his descent two hours later, Tombazi took the opportunity to detour past where the figure had been, and there he saw footprints in the snow resembling those of a human.
During the 1930s there were more sightings of footprints, and one sighting of a mysterious figure. One of the reports of a footprint sighting was made by F. S. Smythe, to whom Wakefield makes reference in his introduction to Strayers from Sheol. It is not impossible that Wakefield, his imagination fired by the reports coming out of the Himalayas, used some of the details reported to create his tale of a horror living in the snows in the Lake District.
‘ “Look
Up There!” ’ is an extraordinary tale by anyone’s standards, the peculiar and terrifying nature of the haunting being left almost entirely to the imagination of the reader. Wakefield, realising that what an individual reader could conjure up was much more frightening than anything he could describe, leaves open the question of what haunts Gauntry Hall on New Year’s Eve, yet gives us tantalising glimpses of the ritual carried out on New Year’s Day. Why does the butler have to go from room to room, opening and closing all the windows save the one in the middle of the first floor of the south wing? Why does he then have to hang a white silk banner out of this window and wave it three times? And what does he have to do after that? Jack Gauntry sobers up at this point, and tells us no more. We get few further clues from Wakefield; although many readers would undoubtedly like to know why the unfortunate narrator of the story of Gauntry Hall, who has surely suffered more than enough already, feels that he would have suffered even more had he not been able to find his electric torch at the crucial moment.
‘Blind Man’s Buff’ is a small masterpiece of horror. Less than 1,800 words, not one of which is wasted, it charts, in a way accomplished by few other supernatural tales, the complete disintegration of the narrator’s nerve, and shows how quickly self-confidence and rationality can give way to apprehension, nervousness, fear, and finally blind terror. From the moment the narrator arrives at Lorn Manor (a wonderfully evocative name, ‘lorn’ being an archaic word meaning ‘desolate’ or ‘forlorn’), the headlights of his car peering ‘suspiciously’ around the bends of the road, we know something is not right, and Wakefield does not stop turning the screw for an instant. It is like a ride on a Ghost Train in its piling on of horrors; and much as a confident reader would like to assume that he or she would surely hold together better than Mr Cort manages, it is difficult to see where he goes wrong. He does all the right, sensible things; all the things, in short, that most readers would like to think they would do in the same situation, but which are still not enough to save him. In the nightmarish world that Wakefield has conjured up, in this story and others in the collection, common sense is of no avail — which may, perhaps, be the most frightening thing of all.
Barbara Roden
Penyffordd
June, 1996
Old Man’s Beard
MR BICKLEY almost precisely satisfies our American friends’ definition of a ‘Regular Fellar’. That is to say, he makes an article of commerce, and by selling it at seven times its cost of production has prospered greatly. Mr Bickley has merely super-tax worries. He is a good ‘mixer’ — he knows sixty-three persons by their Christian names: he is always ready to talk golf shop, with particular reference to a gross eighty-seven he once ‘shot’ on a short course burnt to a cinder. He makes almost exactly the same slice off the first tee twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday, and can stow away several rounds of drinks without becoming unduly pugnacious, verbose or pleased with himself. He goes to and from the City in a big car and smokes a big cigar during the process. And so on and so on. But he slightly diverges from type in two respects; he quite frequently reads a book that has neither been written by Mr Edgar Wallace nor recommended to him for its candid treatment of the Sex Question, and he hasn’t got quite the Orthodox Regular Fellar’s life partner. Mrs Bickley is a bit of an enigma to the other R.F.s. Sometimes they are reassured that she is just what she ought to be — a ‘lovely little woman’, again in our American friends’ idiom — the adjective being a tribute to her character rather than her physical charms, though these are still considerable. But at other times the R.F.s have an unpalatable impression that she would like to take them by the shoulders and drown them in deep water. And then they are rather afraid of her and very sorry for Mr Bickley. As a matter of fact her mother was an Hungarian and temperamental, one who found even the Buda-Pesth variety of R.F. so desperately, irredeemably deadly that none such ventured for long into her presence. She had been the Perfect Mistress in her youth, a Perfect Wife to an Englishman of high intelligence in her middle age, and a formidable and indomitable old woman. In her daughter these characteristics were strongly diluted by Anglo-Saxon tolerance and phlegm; though sufficient of the fiery spirit remained to save her from becoming just a British Female Yawn. She was an avid but virtuous flirt in her youth, she is at present a perfect wife for an Englishman of no particular intelligence, and in her old age she will probably be a bit of an autocrat and a nuisance. And there are still to be found traces of that scarifying old mother of hers; sudden sharp explosions caused by boredom; quick, short-lived ardours for good-looking men with brains — though she meets very few — and apparently causeless fits of temper, so uncontrollable and uncompromising that poor Mr Bickley — that nice little man — has always urgently watched the temperamental development of his daughter and only child, Mariella, for symptoms of that dangerous and irregular Mittel-European strain. And, though they are still further diluted, they are there. She is all right in many respects. She is physically flawless and saved from being merely the ordinary, full-blooded, smooth-skinned, regular-featured Daily Mirror bathing belle by a delicate upward slant of her eyelids, and a certain indefinable but captivating ‘chic’, by an air of slightly exotic breeding and an absolute incapacity for giggling at little odd erotic moments. Again, though she is as intellectually incurious as a portable wireless set she is as sexually inquisitive as a curate, and in Mr Bickley’s opinion she knew What Every Young Girl Ought To Know much sooner than any young girl ought to know it. At the age of fifteen she had driven the chauffeur — a most high-minded young man — almost out of his mind by the warmth of her feelings towards him, and when they were discovered together by Mrs Bickley he had spilled indignant protests all over the garage where Mariella had neatly cornered him. After this infatuation faded, she had experienced a succession of hurried, hot passions for a number of hopelessly ineligible youths, so that Mr Bickley, with a meanness only excused by his desperation, once upbraided her mother for introducing this culpable and devilish strain into the staid and seemly Bickley stock. Whereupon, the Old Lady being in the ascendant, he got about five times as good as he gave and spent a restless night composing a dignified letter to The Times on the dangers of mixed marriages.
And then came that most desired return to Bickleyism, for Mariella accepted the hand — the in every way desirable hand — of young Arthur Randall. Six weeks before it hadn’t been desirable at all, for then he had been extremely impecunious, and merely — or so at least it appeared — a superlative player of games. Mariella had seen him make eighty-four runs against Larwood, Barratt and Staples when the dust was flying, and beat three men in succession to score the winning try against Wales, and as the applause rose and towered she had made up her mind, and prepared herself for a long and fiercely contested battle with her father. And then Arthur’s uncle suddenly slipped his anchor, leaving his nephew £80,000! This timely and unexpected event eased the situation completely, and Mariella was soon flourishing a solitaire diamond ring and the wedding was fixed for the end of October. The beginning of August found them all installed in a well-appointed furnished house at that aristocratic resort, Brinton-on-Sea, which Mr Bickley had rented for seven weeks.
This confinement within four walls gave Mr Bickley a not too earnestly desired opportunity of scrutinising the character of his prospective son-in-law, so far as that young gentleman permitted him to do so. Physically he was beyond criticism. Tall, lithe and dark, he had exceptional vitality and perfect health. He was a joy to look upon, and the fact that he had stood up to the Notts fast bowlers for two hours, and had picked their short ones off his nose and plunked them up against the square-leg boundary was sufficient evidence of his courage and pugnacity, as was that vicious ‘hand-off’ which had turned the Welsh full-back turtle and given him a very sore jaw-bone for a week. It would have been very soothing to have been able to couple these moral qualities and physical attributes with £80,000 and find nothing more to scrutinise. But Mr Bickley reluctantly and irrita
bly nosed up something else; something enigmatic, elusive, buried so deep, as it were, that Mr Bickley felt his nose was only long enough to unearth its fringes and vague outline. What was it? Well, it sometimes revealed itself in sudden and most unexpected flashes of brutal, ruthless insight, almost a devilish sort of flourished egoism, most singular in so usually commonplace a master of moving spheres and ovals. Yet was he ever quite commonplace? Wasn’t that orthodox exterior possibly a very cunningly adjusted mask? Unpleasant questions which Mr Bickley reprimanded his mind for asking about his prospective son-in-law. Yet they had some justification. For example, on one occasion they had all been sitting on the beach and he had been reading out from the Daily Express an account of the lamentable defalcations of a former business acquaintance, with appropriate comments. And then young Randall had suddenly stared into his face with a most ironical and piercing expression and said, ‘There, but for a spot of caution and the grace of Old Nick, went Horace Bickley.’ Which was exceedingly rude and he hoped unjustified. It had taken him very much aback, though both Mariella and her mother had seemed amused. And then again, when they had been discussing a peculiarly unpleasant murder of a young woman by a solicitor’s clerk, and marvelling how he could have brought himself to commit such an atrocity, young Randall had remarked with frigid detachment, ‘She probably bored him, and if by slitting her gullet he prevented her from boring anyone else, I consider he did a service to Society.’ He said something unexpected and in bad taste like that quite often. Did he mean such things? He certainly appeared to. So he couldn’t be quite ordinary. Was that a good or a bad thing? Well, Mariella wasn’t quite ordinary either. All those difficult, adolescent tendencies, now so pleasantly dormant, that her foreign blood explained but didn’t eliminate, and other little signs here and there showed she had a slight streak of some kind. Perhaps their prospects of marital happiness would be increased by the fact that each was slightly peculiar, and certainly it was most reassuring that young Randall seemed so utterly devoted to Mariella, fiercely and fanatically so, and she seemed to have concentrated at last in a sort of smouldering and unvarying way.