Edith Nesbit’s biographers give her ghost stories minimal treatment. Anthea Bell and Noel Streatfeild never mention them. Very unfairly, Doris Langley Moore brushes Nesbit’s stories aside, in her otherwise warm and affectionate book, as being ‘singularly ineffectual and now deservedly forgotten’. Julia Briggs, on the other hand, does not dismiss them, but merely mentions them, though she does go at length into ‘Man-Size in Marble’, which she sees as having sexual connotations. With the amount of sex in Edith’s life – her own and other people’s – that would not be surprising.
I hope readers today will approach Edith Nesbit’s stories with a sympathetic eye. In a genre now heavily laden with massive novels and complex plots, the bald simplicity of her tales of terror comes as a pleasant and refreshing change. They certainly deserve a new audience after all this time.
Hugh Lamb
Sutton, Surrey
May 2017
MAN-SIZE IN MARBLE
Although every word of this tale is true, I do not expect people to believe it. Nowadays a ‘rational explanation’ is required before belief is possible. Let me, at once, offer the ‘rational explanation’ which finds most favour among those who have heard the tale of my life’s tragedy. It is held that we were ‘under a delusion’, she and I, on that 31st of October; and that this supposition places the whole matter on a satisfactory and believable basis. The reader can judge, when he, too, has heard my story, how far this is an ‘explanation’, and in what sense it is ‘rational’. There were three who took part in this; Laura and I and another man. The other man lives still, and can speak to the truth of the least credible part of my story.
I never knew in my life what it was to have as much money as would supply the most ordinary needs of life – good colours, canvasses, brushes, books, and cab-fares – and when we were married we knew quite well that we should only be able to live at all by ‘strict punctuality and attention to business’. I used to paint in those days, and Laura used to write, and we felt sure we could keep the pot at least simmering. Living in London was out of the question, so we went to look for a cottage in the country, which should be at once sanitary and picturesque. So rarely do these two qualities meet in one cottage that our search was for some time quite fruitless. We tried advertisements, but most of the desirable rural residences which we did look at, proved to be lacking in both essentials, and when a cottage chanced to have drains, it always had stucco as well and was shaped like a tea-caddy. And if we found a vine or a rose-covered porch, corruption invariably lurked within. Our minds got so befogged by the eloquence of house-agents, and the rival disadvantages of the fever-traps and outrages to beauty which we had seen and scorned, that I very much doubt whether either of us, on our wedding morning, knew the difference between a house and a haystack. But when we got away from friends and house-agents on our honeymoon, our wits grew clear again, and we knew a pretty cottage when at last we saw one. It was at Brenzett – a little village set on a hill, over against the southern marshes. We had gone there from the little fishing village, where we were staying, to see the church, and two miles from the church we found this cottage. It stood quite by itself about two miles from Brenzett village. It was a low building with rooms sticking out in unexpected places. There was a bit of stonework – ivy-covered and moss-grown, just two old rooms, all that was left of a big house that once stood there – and round this stone-work the house had grown up. Stripped of its roses and jasmine, it would have been hideous. As it stood it was charming, and after a brief examination, enthusiasm usurped the place of discretion and we took it. It was absurdly cheap. The rest of our honeymoon we spent in grubbing about in second-hand shops in Ashford, picking up bits of old oak and Chippendale chairs for our furnishing. We wound up with a run up to town and a visit to Liberty’s, and soon the low, oak-beamed, lattice-windowed rooms began to be home. There was a jolly old-fashioned garden, with grass paths and no end of hollyhocks, and sunflowers, and big lilies, and roses with thousands of small sweet flowers. From the window you could see the marsh-pastures, and beyond them the blue, thin line of the sea. We were as happy as the summer was glorious, and settled down into work sooner than we ourselves expected. I was never tired of sketching the view and the wonderful cloud effects from the open lattice, and Laura would sit at the table and write verses about them, in which I mostly played the part of foreground.
We got a tall, old, peasant woman to do for us. Her face and figure were good, though her cooking was of the homeliest; but she understood all about gardening, and told us all the old names of the coppices and cornfields, and the stories of the smugglers and the highwaymen, and, better still, of the ‘things that walked’, and of the ‘sights’ which met one in lonely lanes of a starlight night. She was a great comfort to us, because Laura hated housekeeping as much as I loved folk-lore, and we soon came to leave all the domestic business to Mrs Dorman, and to use her legends in little magazine stories which brought in guineas.
We had three months of married happiness. We did not have a single quarrel. And then it happened. One October evening I had been down to smoke a pipe with the doctor – our only neighbour – a pleasant young Irishman. Laura had stayed at home to finish a comic sketch of a village episode for the Monthly Marplot. I left her laughing over her own jokes, and came in to see her a crumpled heap of pale muslin, weeping on the window seat.
‘Good heavens, my darling, what’s the matter?’ I cried, taking her in my arms. She leaned her head against my shoulder, and went on crying. I had never seen her cry before – we had always been so happy, you see – and I felt sure some frightful misfortune had happened.
‘What is the matter? Do speak!’
‘It’s Mrs Dorman,’ she sobbed.
‘What has she done?’ I inquired, immensely relieved.
‘She says she must go before the end of the month, and she says her niece is ill; she’s gone down to see her now, but I don’t believe that’s the reason, because her niece is always ill. I believe someone has been setting her against us. Her manner was so queer—’
‘Never mind, Pussy,’ I said. ‘Whatever you do, don’t cry, or I shall have to cry, too, to keep you in countenance, and then you’ll never respect your man again.’
She dried her eyes obediently on my handkerchief, and even smiled faintly.
‘But, you see,’ she went on, ‘it is really serious, because these village people are so sheepy; and if one won’t do a thing, you may be sure none of the others will. And I shall have to cook the dinners and wash up all the hateful, greasy plates; and you’ll have to carry cans of water about, and clean the boots and knives – and we shall never have any time for work, or earn any money or anything. We shall have to work all day, and only be able to rest when we are waiting for the kettle to boil!’
I represented to her that, even if we had to perform these duties, the day would still present some margin for other toils and recreations. But she refused to see the matter in any but the greyest light. She was very unreasonable, and I told her so, but in my heart … well, who wants a woman to be reasonable?
‘I’ll speak to Mrs Dorman when she comes back, and see if I can’t come to terms with her,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she wants a rise in her screw. It will be all right. Let’s walk up to the church.’
The church was a large and lonely one, and we loved to go there, especially upon bright nights. The path skirted a wood, cut through it once, and ran along the crest of the hill through two meadows and round the churchyard wall, over which the old yews loomed in black masses of shadow. This path, which was partly paved, was called the ‘bier-balk’, for it had long been the way by which the corpses had been carried to burial. The churchyard was richly treed, and was shaded by great elms, which stood just outside and stretched their kind arms out over the dead. A large, low porch let one into the building by a Norman doorway and a heavy oak door studded with iron. Inside, the arches rose into darkness, and between them shone the reticulated windows, which stood out white in t
he moonlight. In the chancel, the windows were of rich glass, which showed in faint light their noble colouring and made the black oak of the choir pews hardly more solid than the shadows. But on each side of the altar lay a grey marble-figure of a knight in full armour, lying upon a low slab, with hands held up in everlasting prayer, and these figures, oddly enough, were always to be seen if there was any glimmer of light in the church. Their names were lost, but the peasants told of them that they had been fierce and wicked men, marauders by land and sea, who had been the scourge of their time, and had been guilty of deeds so foul that the house they had lived in – the big house, by the way, that had stood on the site of our cottage – had been stricken by lightning and the vengeance of Heaven. But for all that, the gold of their heirs had bought them a place in the church. Looking at the bad, hard faces reproduced in the marble, this story was easily believed.
The church looked at its best on that night, for the shadows of the yew trees fell through the windows upon the floor of the nave, and touched the pillars with tattered shadow. We sat down together without speaking, and watched the solemn beauty of the old church with some of that awe which inspired its early builders. We walked to the chancel and looked at the sleeping warriors. Then we rested on the stone seat in the porch, looking out over the stretch of quiet moonlit meadows, feeling in every fibre of our being the peace of the night and of our happy love; and came away at last with a sense that even scrubbing and black-leading were, at their worst, but small troubles.
Mrs Dorman had come back from the village, and I at once invited her to a tête-à-tête.
‘Now, Mrs Dorman,’ I said, when I had got her into my painting-room, ‘what’s all this about your not staying with us?’
‘I should be glad to get away, sir, before the end of the month,’ she answered, with her usual placid dignity.
‘Have you any fault to find, Mrs Dorman?’
‘None at all, sir; you and your lady have always been most kind, I’m sure—’
‘Well, what is it? Are your wages not high enough?’
‘No, sir, I gets quite enough.’
‘Then why not stay?’
‘I’d rather not,’ with some hesitation. ‘My niece is ill.’
‘But your niece has been ill ever since we came.’
No answer. There was a long and awkward silence. I broke it.
‘Can’t you stay for another month?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. I’m bound to go on Thursday.’
And this was Monday.
‘Well, I must say, I think you might have let us know before. There’s no time now to get anyone else, and your mistress is not fit to do heavy housework. Can’t you stay till next week?’
‘I might be able to come back next week.’
I was now convinced that all she wanted was a brief holiday, which we should have been willing enough to let her have as soon as we could get a substitute.
‘But why must you go this week?’ I persisted. ‘Come, out with it.’
Mrs Dorman drew the little shawl, which she always wore, tightly across her bosom, as though she were cold. Then she said, with a sort of effort:
‘They say, sir, as this was a big house in Catholic times, and there was a many deeds done here.’
The nature of the ‘deeds’ might be vaguely inferred from the inflection of Mrs Dorman’s voice, which was enough to make one’s blood run cold. I was glad that Laura was not in the room. She was always nervous, as highly strung natures are, and I felt that these tales about our house, told by this old peasant woman with her impressive manner and contagious credulity, might have made our home less dear to my wife.
‘Tell me all about it, Mrs Dorman,’ I said. ‘You needn’t mind about telling me. I’m not like the young people, who make fun of such things.’
Which was partly true.
‘Well, sir,’ she sank her voice, ‘you may have seen in the church, beside the altar, two shapes—’
‘You mean the effigies of the knights in armour?’ I said cheerfully.
‘I mean them two bodies drawed out man-size in marble,’ she returned; and I had to admit that her description was a thousand times more graphic than mine.
‘They do say as on All Saints’ Eve them two bodies sits up on their slabs and gets off them, and then walks down the aisle in their marble’ – (another good phrase, Mrs Dorman) – ‘and as the church clock strikes eleven, they walks out of the church door, and over the graves, and along the bier-balk, and if it’s a wet night there’s the marks of their feet in the morning.’
‘And where do they go?’ I asked, rather fascinated.
‘They comes back to their old home, sir, and if anyone meets them—’
‘Well, what then?’ I asked.
But no, not another word could I get from her, save that her niece was ill, and that she must go. After what I had heard I scorned to discuss the niece, and tried to get from Mrs Dorman more details of the legend. I could get nothing but warnings.
‘Whatever you do, sir, lock the door early on All Saints’ Eve, and make the blessed cross-sign over the doorstep and on the windows.’
‘But has anyone ever seen these things?’ I persisted.
‘That’s not for me to say. I know what I know.’
‘Well, who was here last year?’
‘No one, sir. The lady as owned the house only stayed here in the summer, and she always went to London a full month afore the night. And I’m sorry to inconvenience you and your lady, but my niece is ill, and I must go on Thursday.’
I could have shaken her for her reiteration of that obvious fiction.
She was determined to go, nor could our united entreaties move her in the least.
I did not tell Laura the legend of the shapes that ‘walked in their marble’, partly because a legend concerning our house might trouble my wife, and partly, I think, for some more occult reason. This was not quite the same to me as any other story, and I did not want to talk about it till the day was over. I had very soon almost ceased to think of the legend, however. I was painting a portrait of Laura, against the lattice window, and I could not think of much else. I had got a splendid background of yellow and grey sunset, and was working away with enthusiasm at her face. On Thursday Mrs Dorman went. She relented, at parting, so far as to say:
‘Don’t you put yourselves about too much, ma’am, and if there’s any little thing I can do next week, I’m sure I shan’t mind.’
From which I inferred that she wished to come back to us after Hallowe’en. Up to the last she adhered to the fiction of the niece.
Thursday passed off pretty well. Laura showed marked ability in the matter of steak and potatoes, and I confess that my knives, and the plates, which I insisted upon washing, were better done than I had dared to expect. It was all so good, so simple, so pleasant. As I write of it, I almost forget what came after. But now I must remember, and tell.
Friday came. It is about what happened on that Friday that this is written. I wonder if I should have believed it if anyone had told it to me. I will write the story of it as quickly and plainly as I can. Everything that happened on that day is burnt into my brain. I shall not forget anything, nor leave anything out.
I got up early, I remember, and lighted the kitchen fire, and had just achieved a smoky success, when my wife came running down, as sunny and sweet as the clear October morning itself. We prepared breakfast together, and found it very good fun. The housework was soon done, and when brushes and brooms and pails were quiet again, the house was still indeed. It is wonderful what a difference one makes in a house. We really missed Mrs Dorman, quite apart from considerations of pots and pans. We spent the day in dusting our books and putting them straight, and dined gaily on cold steak and coffee. Laura was, if possible, brighter and gayer and sweeter than usual, and I began to think that a little domestic toil was really good for her. We had never been so merry since we were married, and the walk we had that afternoon was, I think, the happiest time of all
my life. When we had watched the deep scarlet clouds slowly pale into leaden grey against a pale-green sky, and saw the white mists curl up along the hedgerows in the distant marsh, we came back to the house, silently, hand in hand.
‘You are sad, Pussy,’ I said half-jestingly, as we sat down together in our little parlour. I expected a disclaimer, for my own silence had been the silence of complete happiness. To my surprise, she said:
‘Yes, I think I am sad, or rather I am uneasy. I hope I am not going to be ill. I have shivered three or four times since we came in, and it’s not really cold, is it?’
‘No,’ I said, and hoped it was not a chill caught from the treacherous marsh mists that roll up from the marshes in the dying light. No, she said, she did not think so. Then, after a silence, she spoke suddenly:
‘Do you ever have presentiments of evil?’
‘No,’ I said, smiling; ‘and I shouldn’t believe in them if I had.’
‘I do,’ she went on; ‘the night my father died I knew it, though he was right away in the north of Scotland.’ I did not answer in words.
She sat looking at the fire in silence for some time, gently stroking my hand. At last she sprang up, came behind me, and drawing my head back, kissed me.
‘There, it’s over now,’ she said. ‘What a baby I am. Come, light the candles, and we’ll have some of these new Rubinstein duets.’
And we spent a happy hour or two at the piano.
At about half-past ten, I began to fill the goodnight pipe, but Laura looked so white that I felt that it would be brutal of me to fill our sitting-room with the fumes of strong cavendish.
‘I’ll take my pipe outside,’ I said.
‘Let me come too.’
‘No, sweetheart, not tonight; you’re much too tired. I shan’t be long. Get to bed, or I shall have an invalid to nurse tomorrow, as well as the boots to clean.’