The story had taken hold upon us as we sat round the blazing hearth of
Lord Ormont's smoking-room, at Castle Aminta, and sufficiently
interfered with our comfort, as indeed from various points of view, not
to specify any one of the many, for they were, after all, in spite of
their diversity, of equal value judged by any standard, not even
excepting the highest, that of Vereker's disturbing narrative of the
uncanny visitor to his chambers, which the reader may recall--indeed,
must recall if he ever read it, since it was the most remarkable
ghost-story of the year--a year in which many ghost-stories of wonderful
merit, too, were written--and by which his reputation was made--or
rather extended, for there were a certain few of us, including Feverel
and Vanderbank and myself, who had for many years known him as a
constant--almost too constant, some of us ventured, tentatively
perhaps, but not the less convincedly, to say--producer of work of a
very high order of excellence, rivalling in some of its more conspicuous
elements, as well as in its minor, to lay no stress upon his subtleties,
which were marked, though at times indiscreetly inevident even to the
keenly analytical, hinging as these did more often than not upon
abstractions born only of a circumscribed environment--circumscribed, of
course, in the larger sense which means the narrowing of a circle of
appreciation down to the select few constituting its essence--the
productions of the greatest masters of fictional style the world has
known, or is likely, in view of present tendencies towards miscalled
romance, which consists solely of depicting scenes in which bloodshed
and murder are rife, soon to know again--it was proper it should, in a
company chosen as ours had been from among the members of The Involvular
Club, with Adrian Feverel at its head, Vereker as its vice-president,
and Lord Ormont, myself, and a number of ladies, including Diana of the
Crossways, and little Maisie--for the child was one of our cares, her
estate was so pitiable a one--Rhoda Fleming, Daisy Miller, and Princess
Cassimassima, one and all, as the reader must be aware, personages--if I
may thus refer to a group of appreciation which included myself--who
knew a good thing when they saw it, which, it may as well be confessed
at once, we rarely did in the raucous fields of fiction outside of,
though possibly at times moderately contiguous to, our own territory,
although it should be said that Miss Miller occasionally manifested a
lamentable lack of regard for the objects for which The Involvular was
formed, by showing herself, in her semi-American way, regrettably direct
of speech and given over not infrequently to an unhappy use of slang,
which we all, save Maisie, who was young, and, in spite of all she knew,
not quite so knowledgeable a young person as some superficial observers
have chosen to believe, sincerely deprecated, and on occasion when it
might be done tactfully, endeavored to mitigate by a reproving glance,
or by a still deeper plunge into nebulous rhetoric, as a sort of
palliation to the Muse of Obscurity, which in our hearts we felt that
good goddess would accept, strove to offset.
["Excuse me," said Mr. Tom Snobbe, rising and interrupting the
reader at this point, "but is that all one sentence, Mr. Jones?"
"Yes," Jones replied. "Why not? It's perfectly clear in its
meaning. Aren't you used to long sentences on the Hudson?" he
added, sarcastically.
"No," retorted Snobbe; "that is to say, not where I live. I
believe they have 'em at Sing Sing occasionally. But they never
get used to them, I'm told."
"Be quiet, Tom," said Harry Snobbe. "It's bad form to interrupt.
Let Billy finish his story." Mr. Jones then resumed his
manuscript.]
A perceptible shudder ran through, or rather rolled over, the group, for
it was corrugating in its quality, bringing forcibly to mind, quite as
much for its chill, too, as for the wrinkling suggestion of its passage
up and down our backs, turned as some of these were towards the fire,
and others towards the steam-radiator, which now and again clicked
startlingly in the dull red glow of the hearth light, augmenting the all
too obvious nervousness of the listeners, the impassive and uninspiring
squares of iron of which certain modern architects of a limited
decorative sense--if, indeed, they have any at all, for the mere use of
corrugated iron in the construction of a facade would seem not to admit
of an aesthetic side to its designer's nature, however ornately
distributed over the surface of an exterior it may be--have chosen to
avail themselves, prompted either by an appalling parsimony on the part
of a client, or for reasons of haste employed for the lack of more
immediately available material, it being an undeniable fact that in some
portions of the world stucco and terracotta, now frequently used in
lieu of more substantial, if not more enduring materials, are difficult
of access, and the use of a speedily obtainable substitute becoming thus
a requirement as inevitable as it is to be regretted, as in the case of
the fruit-market at Venice, standing as it does on the bank of the Grand
Canal, a pile of stark, staring, obtrusive, wrinkling zinc thrusting
itself brazenly into the line of a vision attuned to the most gloriously
towering palazzos, as rich in beauty as in romance, with such
self-sufficiency as to bring tears to the eyes of the most stolidly
unappreciative, of the most coldly unaesthetic, or, in short, as some one
has chosen to say, in an essay the title of which and the name of whose
author escape us at this moment, with such complacent vulgarity as to
amount to nothing less than a dastardly blot upon the escutcheon of the
Venetians, which all of their glorious achievements in art, in history,
and in letters can never quite ineradically efface, and alongside of
which the whistling steam-tugs with their belching funnels, which are
by slow degrees supplanting the romantic gondolier with his picturesque
costume and his tender songs of sunny climes in the cab service of the
Bride of the Adriatic, seem quite excusable, or, in any event, not so
unforgivable as to constitute what the Americans would call an infernal
shame.
[At this point the reader was interrupted again.
"Hold on a minute, Billy--will you, please?" said Tenafly
Paterson. "Let's get this story straight. As I understand the
first sentence somebody told a ghost-story, didn't he?"
"Yes," replied Jones, a trifle annoyed.
"And the second sentence means that those who heard it felt
creepy?"
"Precisely."
"Then why the deuce couldn't you have said, 'When So-and-So had
finished, the company shuddered'?"
"Because," replied Jones, "I am reading a story which is
constructed after the manner of a certain school. I'm not reading
a postal-card or a cable message."