Fiction ~ short story
Published in Hutchinson's Magazine, July 1924
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,590 words
(First read 08/08/2012)
Reconciliation is EFB's hommage to his favourite novel, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Luckily for us he doesn't set it in the wastes of Northern England¹ but in an unspecified location in the South, possibly Hampshire or Dorset, though it could equally well be Cornwall or Kent.
Hugh Verrall's family have owned Garth Place since the time of Queen Anne², when his ancestor and namesake took it in payment of gambling debts from the previous owner, a wastrel named Francis Garth. The latter died in penury shortly thereafter and proceeded to haunt the place for some time but, at the time our story happens, the hauntings have been in abeyance for some while³. Now then, when our Unnamed Narrator comes to stay, the ghost makes a reappearance and hangs around right up until the time⁴ when, for unrelated reasons, Hugh is forced to sell the house ... and sells it to a direct descendant of the original Francis Garth. Obviously the ending is a happy one.
Verdict: Far more interesting as a take on Wuthering Heights than as a ghost story ~ U.N. (as lily-livered as ever) seems to be the only person actually afraid of the spook, which does nothing more significant than ... well, hang around a lot ~, Reconciliation is a pleasant if somewhat long-winded read. It's available online here.
¹ Unlike, for example, Corstophine (also 1924).
² Which is to say circa 1700.
³ For some mysterious reason Benson, usually the stickler for precise time periods, is very reticent on the numbers here.
⁴ Sorry, I'm making a gash of this but the time frame is a pain to describe: U.N. starts in the present, recalls his first visit to Garth Place, during which he was told the Garth/Verrall story that happened 200 years previously, then returns to the visit, and finally back to the present.
Fiction ~ short story
Published in Eve, 7th June 1922
Collected in Desirable Residences and Other Stories (1991)
Approx. 1,800 words
(First read 06/05/1992)
The Top Landing is one of EFB's 'classic' spook stories ~ but in miniature. Two gentlemen friends, the one an author, the other a composer, rent a Queen Anne house overlooking Romney Marsh (Kent)¹, which comes complete with housekeeper. Its one distinguishing feature is that the resident ghost makes itself very physically felt at the end ... oh and it ends extremely suddenly.
I usually moan about Benson's spook stories being too long; this one's actually too short. Ha! Still, it's quite effective in its quiet way.
¹ Favoured haunt of Charles Dickens. No, it's not the ghost of him, luckily. If it had been, the story would've had to be at least 30,000 words. [joke]
QUOTABLES
Y'know how, in 83% of ghost stories ever written, household pets, farm animals, etc. are meant to be specially 'attuned' to the presence of spooks? Well, EFB seems to have had a notion that household servants also had this 'gift' ~ it's the narrator's 'man' who first voices everyone's fears, with calamitous results for our gent's toilette:
Next morning a domestic bombshell exploded. My servant Manders, who had been with me for ten years, came to me after breakfast and asked if he and my housemaid might go back to London. It was reasonable to ask for an explanation.
"We can neither of us stand it any longer," he said. "I'm very sorry, sir, but I can't stop here, and it's the same with Edith." [...]
"And what's to happen to us if you and Edith go?" I asked.
To which Manders didn't reply, "How about you dress yourself in the morning for once? and light your own fu_king fire?"
This isn't the only story in which Benson used this (erm ...) device, but obviously I can't remember where else he did.
