So many of them are out there on the Internet, but not as accessible as I would like. Big blocks of nearly unreadable text, with nothing interesting to break up the monotony of too many words. Some of these stories are just crying out for a style update, and I'm just the person to do it. At least, when I need to buy some time for my own writing.
So...do you like ghosts?
Ned and Mary Boyne, an American couple in England did...at first.
Here's an Edith Wharton story, called "Afterward".
"Oh,
there is one, of course, but you'll never know it."
The
assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright June garden,
came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its latent significance
as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into
the library.
The words
had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat at tea on her lawn at
Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of which the library in question was
the central, the pivotal "feature."
Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest
of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on
their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who
had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had
rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious
suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It
belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a song."
The reasons
she gave for its being obtainable on these terms -- its remoteness from a
station, its lack of electric light, hot-water pipes, and other vulgar
necessities -- were exactly those pleading in its favor with two romantic
Americans perversely
in search of the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,
with unusual architectural felicities.
"I
should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was thoroughly
uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the two, had jocosely insisted;
"the least hint of 'convenience' would make me think it had been bought
out of an exhibition, with the pieces numbered, and set up again."
And
they had proceeded to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various
suspicions and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
recommended was really Tudor till they learned it had no heating system, or that the
village church was literally in the grounds till she assured them of the
deplorable uncertainty of the water supply.
"It's
too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued to exult as the avowal of
each disadvantage was successively wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to
ask, with a sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost? You've been concealing
from us the fact that there is no ghost!"
Mary, at the
moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her laugh, being possessed of
several sets of independent perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in
Alida's answering hilarity.
"Oh, Dorsetshire's
full of ghosts, you know."
"Yes,
yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten miles to see somebody
else's ghost. I want one of my own on the premises. Is there a ghost at
Lyng?"
His rejoinder
had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she had flung back
tantalizingly: "Oh, there is one, of course, but you'll never know
it."
"Never
know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world constitutes a
ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"
"I
can't say. But that's the story."
"That
there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"
"Well
-- not till afterward, at any rate."
"Till
afterward?"
"Not
till long, long afterward."
"But if
it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant,
why hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family? How has it managed to
preserve its incognito?"
Alida could
only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."
"And
then suddenly --" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous
depth of divination
--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self, 'That was it?'"
She was
oddly startled at the sepulchral
sound with which her question fell on the banter of the
other two, and she saw the shadow of the same surprise flit across
Alida's clear pupils. "I suppose so. One just has to wait."
"Oh,
hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can
only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than that, Mary?"
But it
turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for within three months
of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were established at Lyng, and the
life they had yearned for to the point of planning it out in all its daily
details had actually begun for them.
It was to
sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a widehooded
fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the sense that beyond the mullioned
panes the downs were darkening to a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate
indulgence in such sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen
years the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had ground
on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that still made her
blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine had put them at a stroke
in possession of life and the leisure to taste it.
They had never for a moment
meant their new state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening
against a background of gray walls, he dreamed of the production of his
long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of Culture"; and with such
absorbing work ahead no existence could be too sequestered;
they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge deep enough into the
past.
Dorsetshire
had attracted them from the first by a semblance of remoteness out of all
proportion to its geographical position. But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring
wonders of the whole incredibly compressed island -- a nest of counties, as
they put it -- that for the production of its effects so little of a given
quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short a distance
a difference.
"It's
that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives such
depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts. They've been able
to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite mouthful."
The butter
had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray house, hidden under a
shoulder of the downs, had almost all the finer marks of commerce with a
protracted past.
The mere fact that it was neither large nor exceptional made
it, to the Boynes, abound the more richly in its special sense -- the sense of
having been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life.
The life had probably
not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as
noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour,
into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these
back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of
emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.
The feeling
had never been stronger than on the December afternoon when, waiting in the
library for the belated lamps, she rose from her seat and stood among the
shadows of the hearth.
Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his
long tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred to be
unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal
relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering him, and
that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from
the morning's work.
Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as she had
imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between his eyes had never been
there in his engineering days. Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of
illness, but the native demon of "worry" had never branded his brow.
Yet the few pages he had so far read to her -- the introduction, and a synopsis of
the opening chapter -- gave evidences of a firm possession of his subject, and
a deepening confidence in his powers.
The fact
threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had done with
"business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one other possible
element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his health, then?
But physically he had gained since they had come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only within a week that she had felt in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were she who had a secret to keep from him!
The thought
that there was a secret somewhere between them struck her with a sudden smart
rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the dim, long room.
"Can it
be the house?" she mused.
The room
itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be piling themselves up,
as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet shadow dropping from the
low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the
hooded hearth.
"Why,
of course -- the house is haunted!" she reflected.
The ghost --
Alida's imperceptible ghost -- after figuring largely in the banter of
their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded as too
ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the tenant of a
haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but,
beyond a vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to
impart.
The elusive specter had apparently never had sufficient identity for a
legend to crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set
the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng was one of
the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with supernatural
enhancements.
"And I
suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its beautiful wings in
vain in the void," Mary had laughingly concluded.
"Or,
rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so much that's
ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as the ghost." And
thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their
references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly unaware of the
loss.
Now, as she
stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity revived in her with
a new sense of its meaning -- a sense gradually acquired through close daily
contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of
course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but
secretly with its own past; and if one could only get into close enough communion
with the house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on
one's own account.
Perhaps, in his long solitary hours in this very room, where
she never trespassed till the afternoon, her husband had acquired it already,
and was silently carrying the dread weight of whatever it had revealed to him.
Mary was too well-versed in the code of the spectral
world not to know that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so
was almost as great a breach of goodbreeding as to name a lady in a club.
But
this explanation did not really satisfy her. "What, after all, except for
the fun of the frisson," she reflected, "would he really care for any
of their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown back once more on the
fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's greater or less susceptibility to spectral
influences had no particular bearing on the case, since, when one did see a
ghost at Lyng, one did not know it.
"Not
till long afterward," Alida Stair had said.
Well, supposing Ned had seen
one when they first came, and had known only within the last week what had
happened to him? More and more under the spell of the hour, she threw back her
searching thoughts to the early days of their tenancy, but at first only to
recall a gay confusion of unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling
to each other from remote corners of the house as treasure after treasure of
their habitation revealed itself to them.
It was in this particular connection
that she presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of the previous October,
when, passing from the first rapturous
flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had
pressed like a novel heroine a panel that opened at her touch, on a narrow
flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof -- the roof
which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
practiced feet to scale.
The view from
this hidden coign
was enchanting, and she had flown down to snatch Ned from his papers and give
him the freedom of her discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the
narrow ledge, he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the
long, tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to
trace the arabesque
of yew hedges
about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar on the lawn.
"And
now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about within his arm;
and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long, satisfying draft,
the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat lions on
the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highroad
under the downs.
It was just
then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt his arm relax,
and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her turn to glance at him.
Distinctly,
yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a shadow of anxiety, of
perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following his eyes, had beheld
the figure of a man -- a man in loose, grayish clothes, as it appeared to her
-- who was sauntering down the lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a
stranger seeking his way.
Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred
impression of slightness and grayness, with something foreign, or at least
unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its garb; but her husband had apparently
seen more -- seen enough to make him push past her with a sharp
"Wait!" and dash down the twisting stairs without pausing to give her
a hand for the descent.
A slight
tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at the chimney
against which they had been leaning, to follow him down more cautiously; and
when she had reached the attic landing she paused again for a less definite
reason, leaning over the oak banister to strain her eyes through the silence of
the brown, sun-flecked depths below.
She lingered there till, somewhere in
those depths, she heard the closing of a door; then, mechanically impelled, she
went down the shallow flights of steps till she reached the lower hall.
The front
door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and hall and court were
empty. The library door was open, too, and after listening in vain for any
sound of voices within, she quickly crossed the threshold, and found her
husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.
He looked
up, as if surprised at her precipitate
entrance, but the shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even,
as she fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.
"What
was it? Who was it?" she asked.
"Who?"
he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.
"The
man we saw coming toward the house."
He seemed
honestly to reflect. "The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters; I dashed after
him to say a word about the stable-drains, but he had disappeared before I
could get down."
"Disappeared?
Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw him."
Boyne
shrugged his shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have got up steam in
the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep before
sunset?"
That was
all. 
At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing, had, indeed, been
immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision from Meldon Steep, a
height which they had dreamed of climbing ever since they had first seen its
bare spine heaving itself above the low roof of Lyng.
Doubtless it was the mere
fact of the other incident's having occurred on the very day of their ascent to
Meldon that had kept it stored away in the unconscious fold of association from
which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark of the portentous.
At the moment there could have been nothing more natural than that Ned should
dash himself from the roof in the pursuit of dilatory
tradesmen. It was the period when they were always on the watch for one or the
other of the specialists employed about the place; always lying in wait for
them, and dashing out at them with questions, reproach,
or reminders. And certainly in the distance the gray figure had looked like
Peters.
Yet now, as
she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's explanation of it to have
been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his face. Why had the familiar
appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime
necessity to confer with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains,
had the failure to find him produced such a look of relief?
Mary could not say
that any one of these considerations had occurred to her at the time, yet, from
the promptness with which they now marshaled themselves at her summons, she had
a sudden sense that they must all along have been there, waiting their hour.
***It's not over yet - Edith Wharton broke this story into five installments - A writer after my own heart. Part Two is coming tomorrow...
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