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
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
