by Edmund Ollier.
Originally published in Ainsworth's Magazine: A Miscellany of Romance (Henry Colburn) vol.8 #44 (Sep 1845).
"Last nighte, when deepé sleepe lay on all menne,
And smallé foules did whist their notés sote,
And everie beaste did slombre in his denne,
* * * * * *
I sawe within my chambre, with this e'e,
The grisliest sighte that ever manne did se."
OCCLEVE.
Some years since, while living in the country, I became acquainted with an old gentleman who resided next door to me. He is now, I grieve to say, dead; and though I am possessed of a long list of valued friends, I know of no one who can fill his place. He had been, until a very short time before my introduction to him, a great traveller; and many a curious story of far-off lands has he told to me, while sitting nose and knees into a roaring fire in winter, or, on summer evenings smoking, in some green and leafy nook of his garden, a curiously carved German meerschaum, for which (being a bachelor) he possessed almost a fatherly affection. And a first-rate hand he was at telling a good tale, whether serious or comic, grim or grotesque. He had a firm, clear enunciation, perfect ease and self-possession, a large share of humour, and such a strong and vivid imagination, that in a few words he could place a scene before you with startling and life-like distinctness. Moreover, he had not that almost universal fault among story-tellers, of prolonging a narrative to so great an extent, with little episodical remarks and constant repetitions, that the catastrophe falls perfectly pointless and ineffective upon the hearer. He just hovered about the outset and middle parts of his stories sufficiently to tickle the curiosity of his auditors; but that was all.
One New Year's Eve, (for it was a regular custom with my friend—would that it were so with every one who has the time and means!—to keep up, with great feasting and jollity, all our old English festivals,)—one New Year's Eve, I say, a small party of ladies and gentlemen, myself among the number, were assembled at the old traveller's hospitable house, to hail the birth of Dan Time's new offspring in copious libations of that glorious, noble, genuine Saxon drink, wassail. And it was real wassail, too, that we had; none of your false, flimsy, meretricious French-wine humbug, (which is a scandalous foreign imposition upon the public,) but the true, legitimate English drink, compounded of true, legitimate English ale and roasted crabs, together with sundry other minor ingredients, of which the real wassailer does not need, and the false wassailer does not deserve, to be told.
It was a bleak and bitter evening; with a shrill, moaning, wailing, restless wind, which seemed to go incessantly round and round and round the house, like some wild beast who had no shelter from the night: raw and misty, too, with a sullen leaden sky overhead, and a thick carpet of snow under foot. It was just the very evening of all others for wassail; and I never beheld a more delightful scene of the homely kind, (and there is no scenery like that of home,) than when—dinner being over—the whole party drew themselves in a semicircle about the fire, like so many satellites round Jupiter, and a man-servant—the strongest and most sinewy in the house—entered with a gigantic bowl full of the generous liquor. At this appearance, a kind of subdued murmur ran gently through the whole assembly; and the very fire (though it had been any thing but a dull one before) seemed to grow still greater in its life and spirits; for it chuckled, and laughed, and crowed to itself, and threw countless soft lights and shadows into the room, and burst out at a thousand places into nimble flames, some dancing, some gliding, some lapsing, some heaving and palpitating like living things, some twining and coiling round great masses of coal, some gushing upwards from the heart and centre of the fire, and soaring half-way up the chimney. It was, indeed, a cheerful, jovial scene, enough almost to have turned a bigot into a religious man.
When each and all had been served with great goblets of the steaming wassail, mine host said—
"Well, ladies and gentlemen, how shall we amuse ourselves during the long evening before us?"
An old maiden lady timidly proposed a game at "Kiss in the Ring," and inquired of me whether I didn't think it capital sport; to which I replied "Yes;" considering myself bound by the laws of gallantry to assent to any thing proposed by a lady. But this being violently protested against by some young fair ones, and no other suggestion made, I turned to my friend and said—
"As the ladies, with only one exception, have so violent an antipathy to 'Kiss in the King,' I do not see how we can be better entertained than by listening to one of your adventures in foreign parts, if you will oblige us by narrating one."
The old gentleman was evidently flattered by this proposal; yet, not wishing to appear to desire it himself, he affected to be modest, and replied—
"My dear sir, you do me great honour by such a wish; and although you have often been so kind as to listen to my little narratives, I am afraid that the haps and mishaps of an old bachelor-traveller would be of very little interest to the fair portion of my company."
At this, there was a great cry of "No, no," among the ladies, followed by a loud request from every one present for a story immediately; whereupon, excusing this departure from his habitual modesty before company, upon the plea of its being "impossible to resist the unanimous request of the fair," my friend took a long draught of the generous liquor at his side, and then, casting his eyes for a moment to the ceiling, (in which locality, from some unexplained cause, the ideas of story-tellers are invariably seated,) began as is here set down.
"When I was travelling in Holland and the Netherlands-- But wait a bit. I have two narratives connected with those countries,—one of a ludicrous, the other of a grim nature. Which would you prefer, ladies and gentlemen? Perhaps you had better put it to the vote."
There was not the slightest occasion to do so. From some remarkable appetite for the ghastly existing in almost all people, both young and old, grim tales are invariably most coveted at the very time when one might suppose they would be least desired,—namely, at night; and especially winter nights. A ghost-story, or any other dismal narrative, is considered totally flat and worthless at noon-day. There is no ghastly sensation to be derived from it; no curdling of the blood, no beatings of the heart; none of those glorious tastes of fear which give such a relish to human company and human accessories. But collect a company of all ages, all classes, and all tastes; bring them together after dark—say about midnight; just give a vague hint of some terrible adventure,—and if there is not an universal desire to know more, why the world is altering very much. Of course there are exceptions; but this, I say, is the rule. And so it was on the occasion of which I am now writing. The "grim story" was carried by one simultaneous and deafening shout.
"Well, then," resumed our host, "when I was travelling in Holland and the Netherlands, I met with a night adventure which, for ghastliness, surpasses any thing of the kind I ever heard or read of." [Here what the newspapers call a "sensation" ran through the whole
assembly.] "I was on my way from Rotterdam to the Hague at the time, in company with a friend; but as Delft lay directly in our road, half-way between the two cities first mentioned, we thought we might as well stay a few hours there, particularly as it had the honour of giving birth to the learned Grotius. Accordingly, just about nine o'clock on a fine, clear autumn evening, we rode into the principal street, and looked about us for quarters for the night. We had been riding all day, and it was too late, and we were too tired, to think of any thing but supper and bed.
"Well, we rode along for some time, but not an inn could we light upon that wasn't full to the very garrets. At last we turned down a narrow, straggling thoroughfare, quite dark and shadowy (though by this time a full moon was up) with the overhanging tops of the houses, which almost met overhead; and as silent and deserted as a Russian steppe in the winter, to boot; for the Mynheers are rare fellows for going to bed early, and I don't believe you could have found above two or three score of people awake in the whole city at the time of which I am speaking. However, there was an inn in this street, with a few people stirring about it; and entering it, we learnt, to our immense gratification, that we might have as many rooms as we liked. And in good truth I think we might; for, even from the small portion of the building I saw, I should imagine it was capable of containing—and comfortably, too—every man, woman, and child in the whole town—ay, even including the four burgomasters, who are about equivalent in rotundity of person to our aldermen. In short, it was one of those strange, old, straggling, rambling, sleepy-looking houses, full of odd corners and passages, apparently built for no earthly purpose, which you only meet with in Holland, and which only a Dutchman can devise.
"When I and my friend had supped, (which we did pretty quickly, for, as I have said before, we were desperately tired,) a fat, oily man, who seemed always debating with himself whether he should go to sleep or not while he was walking about, and to have a great inclination towards favouring the somnolent side of the question, showed us up to our bedrooms. The chamber into which I was conducted, was just the kind of apartment you might expect to find in such a house as I have described—large, gloomy, and lofty; with heavy-looking wainscoting half up the walls, a cracked and time-blackened ceiling, and a tremendously wide fire-place, surmounted by a massive carved oak mantel-piece, and paved with blue and white glazed tiles bearing rude pictures of every incident in the Bible.
"I am not a superstitious man; far from it: but, despite all my efforts to the contrary, I could not help thinking, directly I had taken a survey of my chamber, that I should never quit it without going through a strange adventure. There was something in its immense size, heaviness, and gloom that seemed to annihilate at one blow all my resolute scepticism as regards supernatural visitations. It appeared to me totally impossible to go into that room and disbelieve in ghosts. The fact is, I had incautiously partaken at supper of that favourite Dutch dish, sour-krout; and I suppose it had disagreed with me, and put strange fancies into my head. Be this as it may, I only know that, after parting with my friend for the night, I gradually worked myself up to such a state of fidgetiness that at last I wasn't sure whether I hadn't become a ghost myself. The old cumbrous hangings of the bed appeared to my diseased mind to be swelled out as with a whole army of goblins: indeed, I almost thought I saw them move of their own accord; and the carved figures upon the mantel-piece seemed to have entered into some devilish compact on purpose to plague me. Every thing, in short, had a suspicious look; and my nervousness was increased when, upon turning to the door to fasten it, I found neither bolt nor lock.
"This discovery raised a host of new fears in my brain; and a thousand recollections of midnight robbers shot through my mind. 'Supposing,' ruminated I, 'supposing the landlord himself should be a practised robber, and should have taken the lock and bolt from off this door for the purpose of entering here in the dead of night, abstracting all my property, and perhaps murdering me! I thought the dog had a very cut-throat air about him.' Now I had never had any such idea until that moment; for my host was a fat, (all Dutchmen are fat,) stupid-looking fellow, who I don't believe had sense enough to understand what a robbery or murder meant. But, somehow or other, whenever we have any thing really to annoy us, (and it certainly was not pleasant to go to bed in a strange place without being able to fasten one's door,) we are sure to aggravate it by myriads of chimeras of our own brain. So, on the present occasion, in the midst of a thousand disagreeable reveries, some of the most wild absurdity, I jumped very gloomily into bed, having first put out my candle, (for total darkness was far preferable to its flickering, ghostly light, which transformed rather than revealed objects,) and soon fell asleep, perfectly tired out with my day's riding.
"How long I lay asleep, I don't know; but I suddenly awoke from a disagreeable dream of cut-throats, ghosts, and long, winding passages in a haunted inn. An indescribable feeling, such as I never before experienced, hung upon me. It seemed as if every nerve in my body had a hundred spirits tickling it; and this was accompanied by so great a heat that, inwardly cursing mine host's sour-krout, and wondering how the Dutchmen could endure such poison, I was forced to sit up in bed to cool myself.
"The whole of the room was profoundly dark, excepting at one place where the moonlight, falling through a crevice in the shutters, threw a straight line, of about an inch or so thick, upon the floor—clear, sharp, and intensely brilliant against the darkness. I leave you to conceive my horror when, upon looking at this said line of light, I saw there a naked human toe! Nothing more.
"For the first instant I thought the vision must be some effect of moonlight; then that I was only half awake, and could not see distinctly. So I rubbed my eyes two or three times, and looked again. Still there was the accursed thing, plain, distinct, immoveable: marble-like in its fixedness and rigidity, but in every thing else horribly human.
"I am not an easily frightened man: no one who has travelled so much, and seen so much, and been exposed to so many dangers as I, can be: but there was something so mysterious and unusual in the appearance of this single toe, that for a short time I could not think what to be at; so I did nothing but stare at it in a state of utter bewilderment. At length, however, as the toe did not vanish under my steady gaze, I thought I might as well change my tactics; and remembering that all midnight intruders, be they thieves, ghosts, or devils, dislike nothing so much as a good noise, I shouted out in a loud voice, 'Who's there?' The toe immediately disappeared into the darkness.
"Almost simultaneously with my words I leapt out of bed and rushed towards the place where I had beheld the strange appearance. The next instant I ran against something, and felt an iron grip round my body.
"After this, I have no distinct recollection of what occurred, excepting that a fearful struggle ensued between me and my unseen opponent; that every now and then we were violently hurled to the floor, from which, however, we always rose again in an instant, locked in a deadly embrace; that we tugged and strained, and pulled and pushed,—I in the convulsive and frantic energy of a fight for life,—he (for by this time I had discovered that the intruder was a human being) actuated by some savage passion of which I was ignorant; that we whirled round and round and round, cheek to cheek and arm to arm, in fierce contest, until the room appeared to whiz round with us; and that at last a dozen people, (my fellow-traveller among them,) roused, I suppose, by our repeated falls, came pouring into the room with lights, and showed me struggling with a man having nothing on but a shirt, whose long tangled hair, and wild, unsettled eyes, told me he was insane. And then for the first time I became aware that I had received in the conflict several gashes from a knife which my opponent still held in his hand.
"To conclude my story in a few words, (for I dare say by this time all of you are getting tired,) it turned out that my midnight visitor was a madman who was being conveyed to a lunatic asylum at the Hague; and that he and his keeper had been obliged to stop at Delft on their way. The poor fellow had contrived during the night to escape from his keeper, (who had carelessly forgotten to lock the door of his chamber,) and with that irresistible desire for shedding blood peculiar to many insane people, had possessed himself of a pocket-knife belonging to the man who had charge of him, entered my room, (which was most likely the only one in the house unfastened,) and was probably meditating the fatal stroke, when I saw his toe in the line of moonlight; the rest of his body being hidden in shade. After this terrible freak of his, he was watched with much greater strictness; but I ought to observe, as some excuse for the keeper's negligence, that this was the first act of violence he had ever attempted.
"My wounds, thank heaven, were of so little importance, though they presented an alarming appearance at first, that I was able to resume my journey the next day but one; but ever since that night I have had an unconquerable objection to old rambling inns; and I never behold a line of moonlight on the floor without undergoing a very unpleasant sensation."
Thus the old traveller finished his story, to the immense gratification of the gentlemen and terror of the ladies, who declared that "they shouldn't sleep comfortably for months to come." And although I am not a lady, I confess that I was haunted for some weeks after hearing my friend's recital with dreams of toes and madmen; and I took care to have a crevice that happened to be in the shutters of my own room carefully stopped up.