Collected Ghost Stories (77 page)

Sognekirke … Raadhuus
: parish church and city hall.

Mr. Anderson
: the original name of Dennistoun, protagonist of ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book’. May be used as an allusion to Hans Christian Andersen, whom MRJ greatly admired, and translated in 1930: ‘Hans Andersen and the old ballads had already prepared me to find in Denmark what I daresay a great many people do not look for there—a land of romance’ (
E&K
, 144). May also carry a concealed echo of the ‘Marsk Stig [Andersen]’ mentioned above.

Rigsarkiv
: public archive or record office.

48
last days of Roman Catholicism in the country
: Denmark officially became Lutheran in 1536; Viborg played a central role in the Danish Reformation, under the leadership of Hans Tausen (1494–1561). ‘Number 13’ implies a connection between Catholicism and occultism, or even satanism—see the reference to ‘the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church’; and like ‘Lost Hearts’ it makes allusion to the Faust myth: ‘he practised secret and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy’.

49
‘I Bog Mose, Cap. 22’
: 1st Book of Moses [that is, Genesis],
chapter 22
; the story of Abraham and Isaac. The great Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55) used this passage as the starting point for his existentialist masterwork
Fear and Trembling
(1843).

bagmen
: commercial travellers.

51
Bishop Jörgen Friis
: last Catholic bishop of Viborg, from 1521 to 1536. Expelled from the see by the Reformation leader Hans Tausen, and imprisoned in his own dungeon at Hald Castle (see note to
p. 48
), 1536–8. ‘Jörgen Friis’ is amended in MS, corrected from MRJ’s own spelling, ‘Friisen’.

Troldmand
: ‘troll man’; a sorcerer. McBryde wrote and illustrated his
The Story of a Troll-hunt
as ‘a monument of this journey’ to Denmark (
E&K
, 144).

terrier
: ‘A register of landed property … an inventory of property or goods’ (
SOED
).

52
stuepige
: chambermaid.

54
There was no Number 13 at all
: MS follows this with a deleted sentence: ‘Well, I can only say that I must have been drunk [;] there is no other explanation. Drunk or dreaming: and I never do either.’

Scarlet Woman
: the Whore of Babylon. See Revelation 17: 4–5:

And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hands full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication:

And upon her forehead was a name written,
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
.

Reformation exegesis often identified the Whore of Babylon with the Roman Catholic Church.

casus belli
: cause of war.

Baekkelund
: the reference is unclear, though may refer to a café or restaurant. Baekke is some 40 miles south of Hald. Baekkelund is a Norwegian surname.

55
Aarhuus
: city in eastern Jutland, some 25 miles south-west of Viborg.

Silkeborg
: 20 miles south of Viborg.

57
Emily in the Mysteries of Udolpho
: Emily St Aubert, the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s classic Gothic novel
The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794), is, like
all Radcliffe’s heroines, much given to the composition of impromptu verses. MRJ makes particular reference here to the beginning of
chapter 7
: ‘and while she leaned out of her window … her ideas arranged themselves in the following lines …’.

59
‘omnis spiritus laudet Dominum’
: from the closing verse of the last of the Psalms (Psalm 150: 6): ‘Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord.’

61
palæographer
: a scholar of ancient writing.

Hans Sebald Beham
: 1500–50; German engraver and illustrator.

62
Upsala
: Uppsala; Swedish city, which MRJ visited in 1901.

Daniel Salthenius
: 1701–51. MRJ wrote that he had seen in Uppsala ‘two contracts with the devil written (and signed in blood) in 1718 by Daniel Salthenius, who was condemned to death for writing them. He escaped and died Professor of Divinity at Königsberg’ (Cox I, 110).

Written 1901 or 1902; first published in
GSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. KCL MS MRJ:A/4 contains only one page of a draft version of the story.

63
Horace Marryat’s … Danish Isles
: Horace Marryat,
Journal of a Residence in Jutland, the Danish Isles, and Copenhagen
(2 vols., 1860). Marryat also wrote
One Year in Sweden: Including a Visit to the Isle of Gotland
(2 vols., 1862).

Pantechnicon fire
: the Pantechnicon was an enormous (2 acres of space) warehouse for storing furniture in Motcombe Street, Belgravia, London; destroyed by fire, 14 February 1874. ‘Pantechnicon’ (Greek for ‘all the crafts’) is now used to refer to any large furniture-removal van.

64
Råbäck
: MRJ visited Råbäck on his trip to Sweden with McBryde, August 1901.

Dahlenberg’s Suecia antiqua et moderna
: Erik Jönsson, Count Dahlbergh,
Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna
(Sweden Ancient and Modern), 3 vols. (1660–1716). A celebrated collection of engravings of Swedish architecture and landscape, compiled by Dahlbergh; in part aimed to display Sweden as a modern world power.

De la Gardie
: a prominent Swedish noble family. Magnus Gabriel de la Gardie (1622–86) was variously Lord High Treasurer, Lord High Chancellor, and Lord High Steward of Sweden.

65
mausoleum
: MRJ visited the De la Gardie mausoleum at the Cistercian abbey of Varnhem in August 1901 (Cox II, 310).

67
Black Pilgrimage
: the ‘Black Pilgrimage’ to Chorazin may have been MRJ’s invention, but it has subsequently been taken up by a number of writers and occultists. For a study of this, see Rosemary Pardoe and Jane Nicholls, ‘The Black Pilgrimage’ (
PT
, 601–8).

67
Skara
: small cathedral city in southern Sweden, which MRJ visited in 1901.

The book of the Phœnix … and so forth: The Book of the Phoenix
is a fictitious work of alchemical writing;
The Book of the Thirty Words
is also fictitious. Cox II (311) identifies the
Book of the Toad
with Trinity MS 1399,
Bufo Gradiens
(‘Toad Passant’). According to Jewish tradition, Miriam, the sister of Moses, was an alchemist: see Raphael Patai,
The Jewish Alchemists: A History and Source Book
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), chs. 5 and 6. The
Turba Philosophorum
(‘Assembly of the Philosophers’) is a Latin alchemical text reputedly dating to the twelfth century, but first published in 1572; translated into English by Arthur Edward Waite in 1896 as
The Turba Philosophorum, or Assembly of the Sages
.

‘Liber nigræ peregrinationis’
: ‘Book of the Black Pilgrimage’.

68
Chorazin
: a city in Galilee rebuked by Christ for its faithlessness: see Matthew 11: 20–2. Because of this condemnation, Chorazin became identified as the birthplace of the Antichrist, a tradition which seems to have its origin in the seventh-century
Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius
, a significant text for medieval eschatology—as MRJ, author of numerous studies of Latin apocalypses, certainly knew: he had written the entry on ‘Man of Sin and Antichrist’ for Hastings’s
Dictionary of the Bible
(1898–1902), iii. 226–8, which makes reference to Pseudo-Methodius (
PT
, 604).

‘of the air’
: the ‘Prince of the Air’ is Satan; see Ephesians 2: 2: ‘Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’ For an analysis of Satan as ruler of the air (hence his iconographic wings), see Jeffrey Burton Russell,
The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity
(Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 246.

71
devil-fish
: generic term for ‘various large and formidable fishes’; usually refers to angler fish, but in this context most likely ‘the octopus, cuttlefish or other cephalopod’ (
SOED
).

73
Skåne … Trollhättan
: Skåne is the southernmost province of Sweden. Trollhättan is a city in southern Sweden, near Skara; its name, which means ‘Trolls’ hoods’, is clearly significant in the context of the story’s hooded demon. See also note to
p. 51
:
Troldmand
.

On referring to No. 13, I find that he is a Roman priest in a cassock
: see the connections between Roman Catholicism and devil-worship in ‘Number 13’, James’s other Scandinavian story.

74
Harwich
: major port in Essex, very near to Felixstowe (see note to
p. 76
:
Burnstow
).

Belchamp St. Paul
: a village in north Essex, very near the Suffolk border.

Probably written 1903; first read Christmas 1903. First published in
GSA
; reprinted in
CGS
. MS in the King’s School, Canterbury. The title is from a 1793 song by Robert Burns:

O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad;
O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad:
Tho’ father and mither should baith gae mad,
O whistle, an’ I’ll come to you, my lad.

76
Professor of Ontography … St. James’s College
: the Professor of Ontography is James’s coinage, though it means something like ‘Professor of Reality’ (fittingly, given Parkins’s avowed materialism). St James’s is a fictional Oxbridge college.

Burnstow
: a fictional version of Felixstowe, Suffolk, as MRJ notes in the Preface to
CGS
. See also ‘The Tractate Middoth’,
p. 134
, where William Garrett travels to Burnstow-on-Sea.

Templars’ preceptory
: ‘A subordinate community of the Knights Templars; the estate or manor supporting this, or its buildings’ (
SOED
). There is no such preceptory at Felixstowe.

the Long
: the long summer university vacation.

78
Dr. Blimber
: Dr Blimber is the principal of the Brighton school to which young Paul Dombey is sent in Dickens’s
Dombey and Son
. The quotation here is misremembered, or imagined—as the story’s note attests, ‘Mr Rogers was wrong’.

79
Disney
: an allusion to the Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University, endowed in 1851. MRJ applied unsuccessfully for this chair when it became vacant in 1892.

80
round churches
: the Templars did build round churches, such as Holy Sepulchre in Cambridge, or Temple church in the Inns of Court, London.

feræ naturæ
: of a wild nature.

81
martello tower … Aldsey
: Martello towers are small defensive forts and watchtowers built along the British and Irish coastline (and across the British Empire) during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Aldsey is fictional, though there are a number of Martello towers in and around Felixstowe.

‘Now I saw in my dream … meet him’
: another misremembered quotation. This is from the account of Christian meeting the fiend Apollyon (‘the Destroyer’) in John Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
:

Then I saw in my Dream, that these good Companions (when
Christian
was gone down to the bottom of the Hill) gave him a loaf of Bread, a bottle of Wine, and a cluster of Raisins; and then he went on his way.

But now in this Valley of
Humiliation
poor
Christian
was hard put to it, for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul
Fiend
coming over the field to meet him; his name is
Apollyon
. (Bunyan,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford and New York: Oxford World’s Classics, 1984), 46)