'And No Bird Sings ...'

Fiction ~ short story
Published in Woman, December 1926
Collected in Spook Stories (1928)
5,225 words
(First read 30/09/2012) 

Our roving Unnamed Narrator goes to visit his old pal Hugh Granger, his dogs and his wife (yes, in that order).  In a stroke of typically Bensonian good fortune, the cove Hughie has just inherited a delightful little Queen Anne manor-with-estate in Surrey¹.  Within the bounds of his demesne stands a (pardon the terminology) doughnut-shaped wood which, we soon discover, harbours something live, vile and evil which, so as to put his dogs' and wife's (in that order) minds at rest, Hugh resolves to destroy with the aid of the trusty if somewhat lily-livered U.N.  So they do.  The End.

Even the inclusion of Granger's theory² about what the beast actually is³ doesn't do much to dispel the story's essential humdrummery.
It's available online here.





¹ Current [2014] estimated market value £35bn.
² He does like his theories, does Hughie.  See also (e.g.) The Bus-Conductor.
³ As usual, H.G. is far more clued-up on this kind of twaddle than U.N.  It should really have been him writing the spook stories.



THE CRITICS

[Benson's ghost] stories are extremely varied in content, ranging from the horror of vampires, homicidal ghosts and monstrous spectral worms and slugs (in the classic Negotium Perambulans and 'And No Bird Sings') to the satire of humorous tales which poke fun at charlatan mediums and fake seances (Spinach and Mr Tilly's Seance). 

~Richard Dalby in introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson, 1992

Unlike the uniquely Gothic disaster of The Face, the subsequent contributions [to Spook Stories] “And No Bird Sings” (which features an estate rather than a house), Bagnell Terrace, and The Temple are jolly frontier tales in which the bourgeoisie successfully impose their suburban will on to a place which is still haunted by ancient forces. Significantly, after the monstrous spectral slug is exterminated in “And No Bird Sings” (even this is more of a gardener’s nuisance than a mythical dragon), Daisy spies a pair of robins and she chirps that they are “Evidently house-hunting.” Perhaps songbirds are the original little middle-class citizens, or else we have found the bourgeois desire for pleasant houses which recurs throughout Spook Stories residing in the bosom of Mother Nature herself.

~James Mooney at “Tychy”, 25/07/2011. Quoted from here

Hugh Lamb* once observed: "the narrator of A Tale Of An Empty House not only hears and sees the ghost of a murderer, but finds himself wrestling with it. And here we come to one of the keys to Fred's success in this field: his ghosts are very physical". In other frequently anthologised stories - The Face, 'And No Bird Sings', The Temple - the threatening entities are also vengeful, tactile, malign.

~Alexis Lykiard. Quoted from his review of Ash-Tree Press' The Face, first published in All Hallows magazine, 10/2003. *Mr Lamb is an anthologist of ghost stories

The Bus-Conductor

Fiction ~ short story
First published in Pall Mall Magazine, December 1906
Collected in The Room in the Tower and Other Stories (1912)
3,470 words
(Last read 08/06/2012) 

Unlike rather a lot of other folk, in particular the makers of the film Dead of Night (1945), I'm afraid I don't rate The Bus-Conductor very highly.  In it our old pal Hugh Grainger recounts, to our old pal Unnamed Narrator, the story of the night, eighteen months previously, when he had a premonitory vision ~ or possibly  dream ~ while staying at U.N.'s house; and (obviously, as this is EFB) of the episode a month later when the dream ~ or vision ~ was fulfilled.

Approximately one third of the story's length is preliminary waffle and 'theory', also known as padding.  The apparition itself wouldn't frighten a shellshocked dormouse.  And the big reveal, despite involving yet another of Benson's obsessive omnibus crashes, is thoroughly humdrum.  Its saving grace is that it's pretty short.

Anyway, it's available online here.










QUOTABLES
Hugh to U.N. on their latest expedition:

"... why you go ghost-seeking I cannot imagine [...] because your teeth were chattering and your eyes starting out of your head all the time you were there, from sheer fright."

U.N. on Hugh ~ say no more:

Hugh is about six feet high, and as broad as he is long ...

U.N. to Hugh, who spins a good yarn:

Hugh is an ideal narrator.  I do not care for his theories, or for his similes, but when it comes to facts, to things that happened, I like him to be lengthy. [fnarr fnarr]

"Go on, please, and slowly," I said.  "Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is the ruin of story-telling.  I want to hear when and where and how it all was, and what you had for lunch and where you had dined and [...]"

Some critics might say this was the precise downfall of too many EFB spook stories: an excess of irrelevant and frankly rather dull detail leading to far more length than the material demanded.

 

THE CRITICS

Other memorable stories [from The Room in the Tower and Other Stories] include […] The Bus-Conductor, which contains the memorable line “Just room for one inside, sir”. This was later turned into an episode of the classic British movie Dead of Night. In his preface Benson “fervently wishes his readers a few uncomfortable moments.”

~Richard Dalby in introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of E. F. Benson, 1992