FICTION
A BOOK IN ITS SEASON
A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories. By M. R. James. (Arnold. 5s. net.)
THE dealer in sprites and goblins continues to be welcome and well patronized, and it is pleasant to find that one who is generally regarded as the most skilful living member of a queer trade has made his reappearance with new and attrac- tive wares at exactly the right moment in the year. It is less certain than it used to be that Waterloo was won on the playing-fields, but Dr. James, the Provost of Eton, makes us sure that ghosts and apparitions have rattled their bones there.
Not that Dr. James sets his scene at Eton. At one moment he draws us to the East Coast, where three holy-Crowns were once buried in different places as a sort of talisman to keep the Danes, or the Germans, or the French, from landing on our shores. At another moment we are taken to a country spot about which "I need not particularize further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters it would have been found in the south-western of them." And after all, what do we care about the environment of one of the best stories in the book, "A View from a Hill," when the chief feature of the drama is a pair of antique field-glasses through which one looked across a valley and saw the far ridge as it was before trees surmounted it, when, stark against the sky, stood a gallows with a ghastly burden ? Through dead man's eyes, that is; the modern user of those uncanny glasses looked ; actually dead man's eyes, as the story even- tually proves.
It matters little from the standpoint of the compass what the setting of a ghost story may be. The really important thing is that it should make us reluctant to look behind us on our way upstairs, or put our hand into the wardrobe without
first opening wide its door, or forget how easily anyone (or thing) beneath the bed can grip our ankles just after we have
kicked our shoes off. There is not a tale in Dr. James's new volume which fail to' do these things. In each of the stories he works on the sane specified principle that has guided the writer of ghost stories ever since (and perhaps before) Daniel Defoe wrote about Mrs. Veal two hundred years back, a principle which Dr. James himself has defined for us elsewhere than in .4 Warning to the Curious :-
" Two ingredients most valuable in the ooneooting of a ghost story are, to me, the atmosphere and the nicely managed crescendo, Let us, then, be introduced to the actors in a placid way ; let us see them going about their ordinary business, undisturbed by forebodings, pleased with their surroundings ; and into this calm environment let the ominous thing put out its head, unobtrusively at first, and then more insistently, until it holds the stage."
Dr. James is, moreover, a traditionalist in he matter of loopholes. Always he cunningly leaves one for a natural explanation. Some readers may feel, though, that the details of these loopholes are a little too unpleasant. Indeed the one criticism an admirer might make is that the unpleasantness is gratuitous. When the antique glasses in "A View from a Hill" are accidently let fall, "a little pool of liquid formed on the stone slab. It was inky black, and the odour that rose from it is not to be described." This, of course, is the dead man's eyes, and the success of the story depends as little on Such "realism" as does the success of Certain other stories in the collection on a loathsome cloud of great black flies which haunted a spot where blood was once shed, or on what a rural character describes as " a kind of a face . . . the eyes drylike . . . and much as if there was two big spiders' bodies in the holes."
Dr. James must be permitted an idiosyncrasy or two, and perhaps it is only fastidious taste that will account them as drawbacks. All the same it is a pleasure to record that the wondrous charm of the opening tale, "The Haunted House," is unaffected in this respect, thus assuring a flawless send-off to one of the most refreshing fireside books a jaded reader can wish for.
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