Spookery Nook
IN this mechanical age the old-fashioned straight spook story has fallen from its high estate. Not that we are any less superstitious than our forbears ; but we attach our credulities to different • objects, and dignify them with a new vocabulary. Demonology has given place to the lore of Vienna, the advertisement writer has supplanted the witch, and the new astrology, substituting " dimensions " for " humours," deals in even more incomprehensible terms than did the old: The occult is not recognized, unless it cares to attend in due form at a séance and present an ecto- plasmic certificate. When we want our flesh to creep, we turn to the detective story and the thriller. The change is one of fashion rather than essence, yet personally, confessing to my full share both of superstition and credulity, I deplore it ; for the old-fashioned spook story had a greater humanistic value, and, if I must be haunted, I had rather the ghost of a human being, or even a respectable werewolf or devil, than some spectral abstraction that never had shape at all. I feel that Mr. George Robey's dictum,
" It's bettor far to be a good old has-been Than a never-will-be or a never-was," is as true of Limbo as of Peckham Rye ; and for these reasons I hail with pleasure Mr. Benson's latest book. He has the right touch : urbane, practical, horribly normal and con- vincing. He makes the reader sit at his table, crack his nuts, and sip his wine. The candles gleam on the polished surface, the silver winks, the fire is burning : all is reassuring and warm. The voice begins. For a few moments all is still re- assuring and warm : then . . . what is it ? A chill has somehow edged its way beneath the voice. The form of the narrator becomes unaccountably vivid. It grows. The eyes glitter. The form grows bigger, draws nearer, the voice fills the world, and the reader, his mouth dry, stares in fascinated horror . . . It is the royal way of spookery, a knack, an effect hard to analyse :
" Then my eye fell on the date-recorder on my table, and I saw with suivrise that it still registered Tuesday, May 8th, though I would have been willing to swear that last night I had adjusted it to the correct date. And with that surprise was mingled a faint and rather uncomfortable misgiving, and involuntarily I asked myself what Tuesday, what May 8th was indicated there. Was it some day in past years, or in years yet to come ? I knew that such a question was an outrage on common sense ; probably I imagined that I had screwed the cylinders back to the present, but had not actually done so. But now I felt that this date referred to some event that had happened or was to happen. It recorded the past, or . . . was it like a railway-signal suddenly hoisted at night at some wayside station ? The line lay empty, but presently out of the darkness would come a yell and a roar from the approach- ing train. . . This time, anyhow, there should be no mistake. and
knew that I moved the date back again."
I can think of no one else, except Mr. L. P. Hartley, w;7.1 so perfectly has the trick of it as Mr. Benson at his
best. He is not always at his best in this volume, but, taken by and large, it is something to be thankful for.
The stories gathered in Monsters belong really to the thriller class. Only one or two have the shiver-up-the-spine which comes, sudden and disconcerting as an earthquake tremor, from the world next door. Perhaps the best story in the book is Miss Elizabeth Olivier's " The Caretaker's Story," which, written in an artfully prosaic and unexcited manner, manages to leave just that residue of the unexplained which belongs to the best literature in this class.
L. A. G. STRONG.
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