Shivers for Christmas (58 page)

There was a note of defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice as she said the last words. The well-fed, much-too-well-dressed Baroness stared angrily at the dowdy old woman who had come forth from her usual and seemly position of effacement to speak so disrespectfully.

‘You seem to know quite a lot about the von Cernogratz legends, Fräulein Schmidt,’ she said sharply; ‘I did not know that family histories were among the subjects you are supposed to be proficient in.’

The answer to her taunt was even more unexpected and astonishing than the conversational outbreak which had provoked it.

‘I am a von Cemogratz myself,’ said the old woman, ‘that is why I know the family history.’

‘You a von Cernogratz? You!’ came in an incredulous chorus.

‘When we became very poor,’ she explained, ‘and I had to go out and give teaching lessons, I took another name; I thought it would be more in keeping. But my grandfather spent much of his time as a boy in this castle, and my father used to tell me many stories about it, and, of course, I knew all the family legends and stories. When one has nothing left to one but memories, one guards and dusts them with especial care. I little thought when I took service with you that I should one day come with you to the old home of my family. I could wish it had been anywhere else.’

There was silence when she finished speaking, and then the Baroness turned the conversation to a less embarrassing topic than family histories. But afterwards, when the old governess had slipped away quietly to her duties, there arose a clamour of derision and disbelief.

‘It was an impertinence,’ snapped out the Baron, his protruding eyes taking on a scandalized expression; ‘fancy the woman talking like that at our table. She almost told us we were nobodies, and I don’t believe a word of it. She is just Schmidt and nothing more. She has been talking to some of the peasants about the old Cernogratz family, and raked up their history and their stories.’

‘She wants to make herself out of some consequence,’ said the Baroness; ‘she knows she will soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our sympathies. Her grandfather, indeed!’

The Baroness had the usual number of grandfathers, but she never, never boasted about them.

‘I dare say her grandfather was a pantry boy or something of the sort in the castle,’ sniggered the Baron; ‘that part of the story maybe true.’

The merchant from Hamburg said nothing; he had seen tears in the old woman’s eyes when she spoke of guarding her memories—or, being of an imaginative disposition, he thought he had.

‘I shall give her notice to go as soon as the New Year festivities are over,’ said the Baroness; ‘till then I shall be too busy to manage without her.’

But she had to manage without her all the same, for in the cold biting weather after Christmas, the old governess fell ill and kept to her room.

‘It is most provoking,’ said the Baroness, as her guests sat round the fire on one of the last evenings of the dying year; ‘all the time that she has been with us I cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill, too ill to go about and do her work, I mean. And now, when I have the house full, and she could be useful in so many ways, she goes and breaks down. One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so withered and shrunken, but it is intensely annoying all the same.’

‘Most annoying,’ agreed the banker’s wife sympathetically; ‘it is the intense cold, I expect, it breaks the old people up. It has been unusually cold this year.’

‘The frost is the sharpest that has been known in December for many years,’ said the Baron.

‘And, of course, she is quite old,’ said the Baroness;‘I wish I had given her notice some weeks ago, then she would have left before this happened to her. Why, Wappi, what is the matter with you?’

The small, woolly lapdog had leapt suddenly down from its cushion and crept shivering under the sofa. At the same moment an outburst of angry barking came from the dogs in the castle-yard, and other dogs could be heard yapping and barking in the distance.

‘What is disturbing the animals?’ asked the Baron.

And then the humans, listening intently, heard the sound that had roused the dogs to their demonstrations of fear and rage; heard a long-drawn whining howl, rising and falling, seeming at one moment leagues away, at others sweeping across the snow until it appeared to come from the foot of the castle walls. All the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in that wailing cry.

‘Wolves!’ cried the Baron.

Their music broke forth in one raging burst, seeming to come from everywhere.

‘Hundred of wolves,’ said the Hamburg merchant, who was a man of strong imagination.

Moved by some impulse which she could not have explained, the Baroness left her guests and made her way to the narrow, cheerless room where the old governess lay watching the hours of the dying year slip by. In spite of the biting cold of the winter night, the window stood open. With a scandalized exclamation on her lips, the Baroness rushed forward to close it.

‘Leave it open,’ said the old woman in a voice that for all its weakness carried an air of command such as the Baroness had never heard before from her lips.

‘But you will die of cold!’ she expostulated.

‘I am dying in any case,’ said the voice, ‘and I want to hear their music. They have come from far and wide to sing the death-music of my family. It is beautiful that they have come; I am the last von Cernogratz that will die in our old castle, and they have come to sing to me. Hark, how loud they are calling!’

The cry of the wolves rose on the still winter air and floated round the castle walls in long-drawn piercing wails; the old woman lay back on her couch with a look of long-delayed happiness on her face.

‘Go away,’ she said to the Baroness; ‘I am not lonely any more. I am one of a great old family…’

‘I think she is dying,’ said the Baroness when she had rejoined her guests; ‘I suppose we must send for a doctor. And that terrible howling! Not for much money would I have such death-music’

‘That music is not to be bought for any amount of money,’ said Conrad.

‘Hark! What is that other sound?’ asked the Baron, as a noise of splitting and crashing was heard.

It was a tree falling in the park.

There was a moment of constrained silence, and then the banker’s wife spoke.

‘It is the intense cold that is splitting the trees. It is also the cold that has brought the wolves out in such numbers. It is many years since we have had such a cold winter.’

The Baroness eagerly agreed that the cold was responsible for these things. It was the cold of the open window, too, which caused the heart failure that made the doctor’s ministrations unnecessary for the old Fräulein. But the notice in the newspapers looked very well—

‘On December 29th, at Schloss Cernogratz, Amalie von Cernogratz, for many years the valued friend of Baron and Baroness Gruebel.’

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Ernest Temple Thurston (1879–1933) achieved enormous success with his novels
The Apple of Eden
(1905),
The City of Beautiful Nonsense
(1909),
The Greatest Wish in the World
(1910), and a trilogy of the life of Richard Furlong. Often mixing humour with pathos, he was particularly adept with his insights into the psychology of the feminine soul. ‘Ganthony's Wife' is taken from his collection
The Rossetti, and Other Tales
(1926).

T
he custom of telling stories round the fire on Christmas Eve is dying out, like letterwriting and all the amateur domestic arts of the last century. Our stories are told us by professionals and broadcast to thousands by the printing machine. We give our letters to a dictaphone or a stenographer. The personal touch is going out of life, if it has not already gone. In an age where every conceivable machine is invented to save time and labour, we have no time to spare for these things. We are too exhausted from working our machines to give them our attention.

We were saying all this last year as we sat round a blazing wood fire at that little house party the Stennings give every Christmas in that Tudor house of theirs on the borders of Kent and Sussex.

The children had gone to bed. There were five of us grown-ups left round the broad open fire-place where huge oak logs were burning on the glowing heart of a pile of silver ashes that had been red-hot for a week or more.

Miss Valerie Brett, the actress, was sitting inside the chimney corner warming first one toe, then the other. She comes there every Christmas. The children love her. She can make funny noises with her mouth. Also by facial contortion, she can look like Queen Victoria on the heads of all the pennies that ever were minted. In a semi-circle outside we sat, the rest of us, Stenning and his wife, Northanger and myself, smoking our various smokes and sipping that punch, the secret of which Stenning learnt from an old wine merchant in Winthrop Street, Cork. I think he relies on it to secure the few select guests he always has at his Christmas parties.

‘Come down for Christmas. Punch.'

This is a common form of his invitation.

We had been playing games with the children, hide-and-seek being the most popular. We were all a bit exhausted. It was Mrs Stenning who opened the discussion by complaining that there was no one qualified to tell children ghost stories nowadays.

‘We had a man here last Christmas,' she said, ‘and he began one, but the children guessed the end of it before it was half- way through.'

‘Bless 'em,' said Miss Brett.

‘It was a rotten story, anyhow,' said Stenning. ‘You can't make a mystery now by just rattling a chain and slamming a door and blowing out the candle. When the candle went out, young John said, “Why didn't he shut the window?” Our amiable story teller assured John that he did, but he wasn't convincing about it, because Emily said, “'Spect it was like that window up in my bedroom. The wind comes through there when it's shut and blows the curtains about.”'

Mrs Stenning sighed.

‘I suppose they know too much,' she said—‘and all I've done, you don't know, to try and keep them simple.'

‘They don't know too much,' said Northanger. ‘It's more likely we who know too little. We don't believe in the rattling chain and the extinguished candle ourselves. We've been laughing at them for the last twenty years, and they've caught up with us.'

‘Do you mean this civilization's at the end of its evolution?' I asked.

‘Either that,' said he, ‘or we're in one of those hanging pauses, like a switchback when it gets to the top of a crest and just crawls over the top till it gathers a fresh impetus to rise to a higher crest. It's only pessimists who say we're finished. Shedding an old skin is a proper process of nature. There are signs of the old skin going.'

Northanger is a queer chap. He talks very little. This was voluble for him. As usually happens with a man like that, we listened.

‘What signs?' asked Miss Brett.

‘All sorts,' said he. ‘There's even a new ghost. I saw one last Christmas.'

‘You saw one?'

Two or three of us spoke at once.

‘I saw one,' he repeated.

If a man like Northanger admits to seeing a ghost, we felt there must be something in it. It would not be a mere turnip head with a candle inside.

‘Why didn't you tell us when the children were here?' asked Mrs Stenning immediately.

‘It's not a story for children,' he replied. ‘Though I don't know why it shouldn't be. They wouldn't understand it, and that's the first quality required of a ghost story.'

‘Tell us.'

This was practically simultaneous from everybody. Miss Brett pulled her feet up on to the chimney-corner seat, Stenning slipped over to the table and brought round the punch bowl to fill our glasses. I say ‘slipped over' because he moved like a man who does not want to disturb an atmosphere. Somehow that chap Northanger had put a grip on us. We felt he knew that what he was going to tell us was unknowable. He had indeed created an atmosphere, the atmosphere that Stenning was careful not to disturb. There was the proper sort of hush in the air while he was filling our glasses. No one had lit the lights since we had been playing at hide-and-seek. We were all grouped around the light of the fire. Then Northanger began.

‘Do any of you know Ganthony—Ganthony's a tea planter in Ceylon?'

None of us did.

‘Well—that makes it better,' said he. Then he looked across at Miss Brett. ‘You and I haven't met before, Miss Brett,' he said, ‘till our good friends brought us together this Christmas. I've seen you on the stage, but not being one of those admirers who have the courage to offer their congratulations without introduction, you haven't seen me till now.'

In that prelude, I suddenly had a glimpse of Northanger's way with women, an odd sardonic sort of way, too subtle for most of them, but conveying with it an impression that he was not unsusceptible.

She smiled as he continued:

‘In case our good friends haven't told you then,' he went on, ‘it's necessary to say I'm a bachelor. I have rooms in Stretton Street, Piccadilly. I've been there seventeen years. When they pull down Devonshire House, they pull me off my perch. That'll be the end of Stretton Street. I don't mean my going. But without the restraining influence of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts and the Duke of Devonshire, Stretton Street will become anybody's street. A cinema theatre in those new buildings they are going to put up on the site of Devonshire House will send Stretton Street to the dogs. It's like that with people. Ninety per cent of us live by example. However, my story's about Ganthony.

‘It was last Christmas. I mean 1923. I was staying in town. I often do. I like London on Christmas Day.'