A surfeit of just desserts
Reunion at Dawn and Other Uncollected Ghost Stories (2000) by H. Russell Wakefield
Readers unfamiliar with Reunion at Dawn may wish to read these notes only after reading the stories.
Reunion at Dawn and Other Uncollected Ghost Stories (2000) by H. Russell Wakefield contains stories from the last half of the author's career. They represent a continuation of his aesthetic course in late career away from the comfortably articulate bourgeois milieu explored so brilliantly by Benson and Onions. Wakefield, a frontline student of life's peripeteias, was moving deeper into the louche and lumpen world explored in England by Gerald Kersh and, later, Ramsey Campbell.
"Torn to pieces"
The recurring image of Wakefield's supernatural fiction in the first half of his career is the river, stream, pond, or lake. These are stretches of water where people died, rushing fearfully or in the grip of a strange joy, to embrace their end. Some bodies of water give up their human dead, but mostly the dead want company, and try to recruit the living to join them.
Reunion At Dawn replaces "to the river" with "torn to pieces." The phrase itself occurs in three late tales. And make no mistake: Wakefield means in each instance that crowds, maddened or bewitched or both, tear individuals limb from limb.
Survivors in these late stories may not be torn apart by lynch mobs, satanic mannequins, or attendees at Labour election rallies, but everyday life is skinning them alive. Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers are enraged by the narrow horizons of their lives, and view loved ones as obstacles to the prison-house of class society.
The stories
Reunion at Dawn
In Wakefield, marriages suffer more deadly derailments than a railroad. In "Reunion at Dawn," Maisie Beltane spends a last night alone in the old house before husband Bert's funeral. A fretful night, filled with stupid fancies bred by whisky.
[….] Bert had got quite suspicious. She’d never forget his last words: ‘If you’ve been giving me anything, Maisie, I’ll never let you . . .’ And then his jaw had dropped. Do? What could he do? He couldn’t do anything. Not when he was under ground. But before that? Nothing of course. Suddenly her eyes became intent, as though she were listening. Did dead bodies move at all when they were—changing? Possibly a little. All sorts of things were happening inside them. They’d happen to her one day. Not for donkey’s years!
Moral: "Smaller doses more often would be better."
The Fire-Watcher's Story
The Blitz cast its shadow in two stories in Strayers From Sheol. Unexploded bombs unleashed horrors and confirmed premonitions in "Death of a Bumblebee" and "The Last Meeting of Two Old Friends" with the poetic timing of the eternal snickering footman.
But these were postwar tales. "The Fire-Watcher's Story" recounts actual wartime experience in blacked-out London. An old member of a fire watcher team recounts his brief partnership with newcomer Mr. Reddy, a steady drinker.
They are assigned to keep watch at a factory where the day shift makes rubber diving suits.
[….] We does a bit of a stroll round and then we sits down in a small cubby-’ole affair near the central orffices. And to get there we ’ad to go up a narrow, windy staircase, spiral staircase, that’s the word. Now Reddy’s goin’ up a’ead of me and I couldn’t ’elp but notice the shadows on the wall. It was all dark but for our lamps, but they was miners’ lamps and good ’uns. Now I can see Reddy’s shadow and mine goin’ up with us. I can see ’em clear enough, yet it seems to me as if there’s another one between the two, just as if there was someone goin’ up with us just be’ind Reddy. It was a biggish shadow, but it didn’t seem to ’ave no legs. I couldn’t figure out what was makin’ it. But then shadows is funny things....
Wakefield creates a stinging set-piece at the end, when the narrator takes a break from hunting for the drunken Reddy.
‘When I reached the D.S. shop I listens for a while outside the door. Not a sound ’cept the usual, I thinks at first, but then I ’ears a noise I can’t kind of place, a quick little chokin’ sound; might ’ave been from the pipes, a-course. Well, I goes in and looks all round the big shop and there’s no sign of Reddy, so I pulls up a chair and sits down near the wall below where all the divers’ suits is ’angin on big ’ooks. You see, they blows ’em up, then puts ’em in water to see if there’s any pin-’oles in ’em, and then, still blowed up, they ’angs ’em up to dry. And they looks queer ’angin’ in a long, long row like that just lit by one lamp....
Parrot Cry
Parrot continues wife's verbal abuse of husband after her death.
Surprise for Papa
The dramaturgical square is on display: seven year old daughter, widower papa, new governess. And the recently deceased mother.
It's not a happy luncheon table.
‘What do you mean when you say you play with—her?’ he asked.
‘We don’t play, we talk,’ said Dorothy. ‘Sometimes we talk about you; we did this morning.’
Mr Sprang put down his knife and fork and pushed back his plate. His face had flushed from some emotion, possibly anger. ‘How dare you say such things, tell such lies!’ he exclaimed, and his voice was thick.
Dorothy said nothing.
‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’
‘Oh, what’s the matter with you?’ cried Miss Farrer. ‘Control yourself! Why make such an absurd fuss? You only encourage her to say such things. She won’t talk about them unless you do. Leave her alone.’
‘I want to cure her, and I will, too!’ almost shouted Mr Sprang. ‘She says her mother talks to her about me. That is a flagrant falsehood. I’ll make her confess it. I’ll whip her till she does. You say your mother talks to you. Well, what does she say? Go on, what does she say?’ His pale, hard eyes were flickering. Dorothy stared back at him. Her face wore that look of almost sinister maturity.
‘She said,’ she replied slowly, ‘that you think you are going to marry Miss Farrer, but you won’t.’
There was a moment’s silence. Mr Sprang took a gulp at his beer; his hand was shaking.
‘And what else did she say?’ he asked urgently.
Little Dorothy smiled for the first time. ‘She said you would have a great surprise today.’
Final Variation
Nephew dreams he murders stingy uncle.
The Sandwich
Gigolo weds an old maid heir to her family's jute fortune.
Thin ice and a thick bully-beef sandwich.
The Fall of the House of Gilpin
Charming. Retirement of an old butler who knows disaster is coming to the House.
Vengeance Is Ours!
At the risk of flippancy: mannish sister thwarts dead brother's murderous wife and her paramour.
"Vengeance Is Ours!" is a weird, sublimated, sharply charged story.
Pete was my twin brother —not my identical twin, of course, for I am his sister. I do not wish to dwell on our feelings for one another. Our love was, I think, absolute, and our understanding, our affinity, the same. We were one, in so far as male and female can ever be so. Our parents were killed together in an aeroplane crash ten years ago, when we were seventeen. My father left a very great fortune, which was inherited equally by us.
My brother was the finest man it is possible to imagine. Physically he was a super-man, six foot three, a splendid athlete and extremely handsome. His vitality, bodily and mentally, was superb and inexhaustible. In spite of being a very rich man he never indulged himself, but founded his own business at twenty-one; when he died it was already an overwhelming success. During the War he was an ace fighter-pilot, and ran his business at the same time. He was completely fearless and flawlessly straight. In a very, very diminished way I am like him: I am big and strong and tireless, and good-looking in a rather hard, ‘mannish’ way. I have never felt fear, and do not quite know what the word means, but then I have never been tried very high. I am always told I have a masculine mind. Feminine pursuits do not interest me in the least. I, too, run a fairly large business and a small art gallery, both of which are successful enough. I run my own planes and race my own cars and speed-boats. Speed is an absolute essential to my nature.
Many men have asked me to marry them; but then, of course, I am a very rich woman! I cannot imagine marrying anyone, for every man I have known is so immeasurably inferior to Pete.
The Assignation
‘Well, for one thing, I don’t do it for nothing,’ smiled Charles.
‘I realise that, my dear chap; but surely, when all’s said and done, there’s only a strictly limited public for ghost stories, and most of them of more or less unsound mind. It isn’t, my dear fellow, as if you couldn’t do anything else. A Raking Chestnut was a darned good satirical novel. I preferred it to A Handful of Dust; less basic snobbery and a firmer plot. Didn’t it sell well?’
‘Eight thousand Home, two thousand Colonial, twelve thousand America.’
‘Well, there’s money in that, my dear chap. I mean one can exist with that sort of thing as the sheet-anchor. I know, because my rake-in is round about there. I bet you don’t do those figures for—what shall I call it?— Lazarismus.’
‘No, I don’t, though I sell the stories individually fairly well.’
‘There you are! But leaving the shekel angle out, what about the honour and glory, the prestige, your repute as an artist? For what after all is a ghost story? A purely arbitrary exercise in perverted ingenuity. I mean it’s not as if there is such a thing as a ghost.’
‘You’re perfectly sure about that?’
‘Of course; and so are you. Aren’t you now? Be honest!’ ‘Not quite,’ said Charles, looking down at his hands.
‘You don’t like to confess it, naturally. But as I said to Willie Stanford the other day, the whole conception belongs to a purely primitive mode of thought; Things! Steps on the stairs! Clanking Chains! and tutti bunki. They are contemporary with the Woad Era, simply Paleolithic. The sophisticated modern mind has grown out of, rejected, infantilism. It’s what the Yanks call Pulp Dope.’
Does marriage continue after death for a writer of ghost stories? "The Assignation" begins with two writers debating supernatural fiction. Ultimately the story takes a poignant turn, and earns its emotional ending.
The Latch-Key
Mr. Malgreen cracks up on the lee shore of a suspicious wife and a blackmailing downstairs mistress. Blameless, duped -- and finally with only the hangman as company.
'The Night Can Sweat with Terror!'
A stream of consciousness recapitulation of "The Latch-Key."
At World's End
Child-murder, vigilante justice, London urban squalor. In the end, when a mob cannot find the suspected child killer, they leave the man's spouse and another man trying to disperse them "torn to pieces."
Is Wakefield's use of the phrase "torn to pieces" an allusion to classical furies, or a register of the author's frustration with his own materials? The suggestion of urban mob violence, alien to earlier historically bucolic ghost stories, marks a definite aesthetic borderline, a place where Wakefield seems most challenged and contented.
An Air of Berlioz
He went restlessly to my second-best friend, my Victrola, and switched it on. At once came purring out the love duet from Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet. This is, of course, ‘sung’ by the orchestra alone. To those unacquainted with this strange and sublime failure, I may say this section breathes the very air and bouquet of a perfect Italian summer night and the ecstasy of young love. It has for its dominating theme a tiny barcarolle lilt, as beautiful as anything that ever visited the creative ear of genius. It recurs a number of times, always longingly anticipated, yet always in a deliciously and subtly varied context. Peter listened without a word till the record died.
‘What’s that?’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s the most exquisitely southern thing I ever heard.’
A successful stage actor, superstitiously opposed to playing Romeo, changes his mind, persuaded by the Berlioz score.
The Bodyguard
"The Bodyguard" relates the last few nights on patrol of watchman Owen Rand at the Maison Soignée in Sere Street. Its owner is the famous costumier, Madame Soignée (alias Mrs Ruggins).
Madame has organized her display room around mannequins made by a Satanist artist before he killed himself. They prove queer night-shift companions for Owen, even before the last in a long line of misfortunes blights his life.
.... he took a hurried, fearful glance at the ‘dummies’, or, as they were more technically termed, ‘models’. These were the feminine figures on which the gowns were draped for inspection; those approved by the customer were then seen on the mannequins. These models were of thin steel alloy, and were coloured silver and black. They were of different sizes, but all of the same design. The face was a violent aquiline, with thick sensual lips, a pointed, tilted chin, deeply hollowed eyes with scarlet pupils, a high, bulging forehead, and hair which streamed back in snaky, rippling, silver waves. The general effect was maenadic, formidable, and, to some, highly repulsive. Their bodies were Minoan: very long-legged, tiny-waisted, small-breasted. The hands at the ends of their adjustable arms were abnormally long, their crimson nails pointed and curved like talons. They were the design of a young, very beautiful, and very evil French sculptor with whom Madame had had her first and last extra-marital affair eight years before. It had been brief, violent, and tragic, for the highly talented youth had been found dead—murdered—in his studio in oddish circumstances. He had been a reputed Satanist, whatever that may precisely be, and his rather horrid end was generally attributed to that fact.
He had modelled these figures with quite unnecessary finish. The skeleton was most firmly stated; every muscle was articulated. And those muscles were powerful, almost masculine. In fact, there was something definitely equivocal, epicene, and hermaphroditic about these creatures. The traveller recalled that reclining figure in the Museo Nazionale at Rome, but this conception was far more kinetic and harsh. They violently fascinated some who saw them; others pretended to like them; the majority were sharply repelled, and some dreamed dreadfully of them. When he’d seen them finished in the factory, the young man had given Madame a glance from his brilliant, wicked eyes and then, standing in front of them, pronounced some incantation.
‘Aleece,’ he said, smiling, ‘I have given them their orders. They are now your bodyguard, Anyone who tries to harm you will feel their claws—and suffer.’
When he died, Madame had suffered the agonies of the damned. She realised these figures were not altogether a success or a commercial asset, but nothing on earth would have persuaded her to discard them; the spirit of Alexandre lived on in them for her.
Owen by no means shared these sentiments; in fact, he loathed the sight of these figures. He could never look them straight in the face. He hated opening the door and seeing them standing there, watching him, as it were. To him they were, in a sense, alive. His hate and dread of them was personal, and, indeed, in that dim light they seemed full of an intensely controlled vitality which would have impressed, almost certainly disagreeably, much more sophisticated persons....
"The Bodyguard" is steeped in an ever-thickening atmosphere of impending death from its first lines.
'That Sleep of Death'
A brief memoir by another inmate of Dr Landon's asylum, which we last visited in the Strayers From Sheol tale "Monstrous Regiment."
The narrator, committed for the murder of his wife, explains his future plans: "I shall die bravely, too. And then I shall dream and telepath my dreams. Thousands shall share them night after night."
The dreams will apparently be a recapitulation of the story he tells us from inside his cell: brutal, insistent, unignorable. And contagiously maddening.
Familiar Spirit
‘I see, Ned, you are resolved to play the game through to the end. So be it. Certes, you know me, Ned. How I never feared yet, man or fiend. You were the same, for we were the same in all things. If by chance it had happed the other way, as it well might have done, and you had thrust me through that window, and I had come back to revisit you, you would not have blanched or played the craven. No more shall I. Do your worst, Ned. I will learn to mock you and, who knows, even grow fond of your company. It may be I should come to miss you, Ned, if you went away. Lord knows, Ned, what existence may be like in the place whither you have gone, but rest assured you will find dogging my footsteps poor sport enough. There are wine and wenches for me, Ned, and the stoop of the hawk, and the tune of the hounds with the breeze on their cheeks; but only for you, poor ghost, the envy of watching my good fortune, and sour memories to compare with my sweet, lusty life; and at night a chill wind for you, a warm lass for me. So go, Ned, if you have still your old wits about you, but stay if you have a mind to do it; whichever you choose, it will be quits for me.’
"Familiar Spirit" is the pitch-perfect Regency-period saga of two brothers. Both struggle to survive on a family income only large enough for one. The end, pure Wakefield, is superb.
"Familiar Spirit" is the best and most substantial story in the collection.
A Man's Best Friend
"A Man's Best Friend" is a macabre cavalcade of old-new ghost story elements. The avenging specter, dressed in mourning, haunts aspiring Labour politician Ernie Sweatem during his campaign.
Ernie opened his campaign with a rally at the Town Hall. A fair percentage of the audience was hostile, and there was a steady plague of miscellaneous heckling. So long as it was confined to the affairs of the nation, Ernie took this stereotyped nonsense in his confident stride; but there was one critic who bothered him excessively, or so it appeared to the audience. At irregular intervals came an odd cry. It was extremely penetrating, high, thin, and reedy, and curiously ventriloquistic, it seemed, for no one could accurately ascertain whence it came. Some found its utterance in those weird tones excessively droll, the work of some smart joker, no doubt. Others, more percipient, perhaps, thought it extremely disconcerting; almost unnerving, and not funny at all. This cry took the form of a most absurd and pointless question: ‘Who put the dial pills in the aspirin bottle?’
The story ends at a final campaign rally that turns bloodier than the prom in "Carrie." The crowd, bewitched by the spectral heckler, explodes in murderous fury.
Conclusion
In her Afterword to Reunion at Dawn, Barbara Roden observes:
Although Wakefield is often thought of as a ‘Jamesian’ writer, he in fact eschewed most of the trappings which are now considered the hallmark of the Jamesian style: few antiquarians or clerics poking about in musty libraries or family vaults; few medieval manuscripts or churchyard inscriptions bringing doom to innocent enquirers; few, if any, inheritors of country houses which (of course) harbour ancient and dangerous secrets; and very little which does not take place in the here and now.
I believe this is correct. It confirms a thought I expressed in my post about Strayers From Sheol:
In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural (1986), editor Jack Sullivan includes H. Russell Wakefield in a list of "antiquarian followers" of M. R. James. Sullivan lists Wakefield with E. G. Swain and R. H. Malden.
This subclassification is an error. It has done disservice to the scope of Wakefield's accomplishments. The use of old grave inscriptions and artifacts in a story does not qualify a writer to be pigeonholed "in the M. R. James tradition."
Early in his career, Wakefield had more in common with E. F. Benson and Oliver Onions, two writers whose contemporary reputations rested on popular comedies, melodramas, and crime books. Unlike them, H. R. Wakefield never made a living from writing after the first few years of his career. But his early stories explored similar types of men, women, workplaces, houses, and properties as theirs do, and all three writers clearly worked hard at realistically depicting a modern world shaded with the spectral.
I concluded that Wakefield was
....a writer who moved from the world of E. F. Benson and Oliver Onions to the world of Aickman, Matheson, Shirley Jackson, and Gerald Kersh in his lifetime.
The only additional author name I would add to that list today is Ramsey Campbell.
Reunion At Dawn collects seventeen stories. All but one are set in the here and now of the 20th century. Men and women, most headed down the class ladder, might not arrest their descent before falling off the bottom rung. Others end their adventures in custody, or dead from a surfeit of just desserts.
Jay
28 June 2023
