The Double Eye

by William Fryer Harvey

  Copyright Information

  THE DOUBLE EYE

  by

  WILLIAM FRYER HARVERY

  INTRODUCTION

  by

  RICHARD DALBY

  Published by Tartarus Press

  This edition is published by Tartarus Press, MMIX at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK.

  This collection © Tartarus Press, 2009.

  Introduction © Richard Dalby, 2009.

  With thanks to Jim Rockhill.

  The following stories were first published in Midnight House and Other Tales, Dent (London), 1910: ‘Midnight House’, ‘The Star’, ‘Across the Moors’, ‘August Heat’, ‘Sambo’, ‘Unwinding’, ‘Sarah Bennet’s Possession’, ‘The Tortoise’.

  ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ was first published in The New Decameron, Basil Blackwell (Oxford), 1919.

  The following stories were first published in The Beast with Five Fingers, and Other Tales, Dent (London), 1928: ‘Six to Six-Thirty’, ‘Blinds’, ‘Miss Cornelius’, ‘The Heart of the Fire’, ‘Peter Levisham’, ‘The Clock’, ‘Ghosts and Jossers’, ‘The Sleeping Major’, ‘The Ankardyne Pew’, ‘The Tool’, ‘The Devil’s Bridge’, ‘Two and a Third’, ‘Miss Avenal’.

  The following stories were first published in Moods and Tenses, Basil Blackwell (Oxford), 1933: ‘The Double Eye’, ‘The Dabblers’, ‘Mrs Ormerod’, ‘The Follower’, ‘The Man Who Hated Aspidistras’, ‘Double Demon’.

  The following stories were first published in The Arm of Mrs Egan and Other Stories, Dent (London), 1951: ‘The Arm of Mrs Egan’, ‘Account Rendered’, ‘The Flying Out of Mrs Barnard Hollis’, ‘The Habeas Corpus Club’.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Richard Dalby

  Midnight House

  The Star

  Across the Moors

  August Heat

  Sambo

  Unwinding

  Sarah Bennet’s Possession

  The Tortoise

  The Beast with Five Fingers

  Six to Six-Thirty

  Blinds

  Miss Cornelius

  The Heart of the Fire

  Peter Levisham

  The Clock

  Ghosts and Jossers

  The Sleeping Major

  The Ankardyne Pew

  The Tool

  The Devil’s Bridge

  Two and a Third

  Miss Avenal

  The Double Eye

  The Dabblers

  Mrs Ormerod

  The Follower

  The Man Who Hated Aspidistras

  Double Demon

  The Arm of Mrs Egan

  Account Rendered

  The Flying Out of Mrs Barnard Hollis

  The Habeas Corpus Club

  INTRODUCTION by Richard Dalby

  WILLIAM FRYER HARVEY is remembered today for a handful of superlative uncanny and enigmatic tales, all regular anthology favourites, notably ‘August Heat’, ‘Miss Cornelius’, ‘The Ankardyne Pew’ and ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’. He was once acclaimed (in a lengthy essay on supernatural fiction in The Times Literary Supplement in 1955) as one of the greatest ghost story writers of the twentieth century alongside M.R. James and Walter de la Mare.

  Although Harvey wrote sixty-four short stories over three decades (circa 1905 to 1935), only a comparatively small fraction fall definitely into the supernatural category. It is strongly hinted throughout his work that witnesses to uncanny phenomena are suffering from varying degrees of warped imagination, panic, hysteria, psychosis, or complete insanity. He drew heavily on the new psychiatric lore of the irrational subconscious, and specialised in creating a lingering uncertainty in the reader’s mind. Harvey is a master of the inconclusive or psychological ghost story, and his sardonic fantasies often come near to the genius of Saki and John Collier. Only very rarely did he attempt a traditional or old-fashioned ghost story, the earliest example being ‘Across the Moors’.

  Occasionally his tales—like ‘The Ankardyne Pew’—have an excellent Jamesian ‘feel’, although their story lines are very different. As Harvey’s relative, Charles Fryer, has observed in his 1981 monograph, the stories of both writers introduce ‘the unpleasantness’ by slow degrees, leading—with M.R. James—to a moment of ghastly horror, whereas—with Harvey—‘there are unexpected turnings in which one peers down vestibules of increasing gloom; it is not the sudden stab but the tightening of the garrotte which performs the “coup de mal”.’

  Reading all his bizarre tales, it is quite easy to assume that the author must have been a distinctly strange and eccentric (if not manic) personality. However, the exact opposite is true, judging from all the affectionate recollections and tributes by his many friends (especially those in the Quaker community).

  ***

  William Fryer Harvey was born on 14th April 1885 at West View, Headingley, near Leeds in Yorkshire, the son of William Harvey, a retired merchant and prominent Quaker. His mother, Anna Maria Harvey, was much loved in the local area, where she and her husband were continuously busy with philanthropic work. The death of a bachelor uncle had made William Harvey wealthy, able to retire early and devote himself to his family of seven children.

  The boy’s childhood, lovingly recalled in his memoir We Were Seven (1936), was extremely happy. Every page in this book reflects the goodness and affection of an ideal Quaker family, with (unlike Saki’s home life) no prototypes of any female dragons or aunts haunting the scene to inspire the sinister women in his later literary oeuvre. Curiously, Harvey uses fictitious names for people and places (and calls himself ‘Richard’ throughout), but otherwise this memoir is a true picture of his idyllic early years.

  The one book that Harvey remembered best from his childhood was a cheap reprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Horror, and this was the main foundation stone of his own literary career. He recalled: ‘I read it under the dining-room table, screened from casual observation by the long blue folds of the tablecloth. The light and the print were so poor, the tales themselves so frightening, that I took my stimulant in doses that were comparatively small. I read of the ‘Pendulum’, of the ‘Descent into the Maelstrom’, and finally, taking my courage in both hands, of the ‘Mesmerised Corpse’ [‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’]. The idea of a mesmerised corpse may be harmless when entertained an hour before a dinner of boiled beef, dumplings and carrots, with a rice pudding to follow that left nothing to the imagination. Twelve noon is a comfortable hour of the day, but what about twelve midnight, the witching hour when ghosts are abroad? There was the cistern room at the top of the house with its door which would not keep shut. Horrible things might have happened in the cistern room, a horrible thing might issue from it when all were sleeping, in the hope of finding someone who was still awake.’

  Harvey’s childhood fantasies were allowed a free rein in regularly produced handwritten family papers, such as ‘The Pickle Jar’ and, later, ‘The Missing Link’. Unfortunately, these have not survived.

  He was educated at the Quaker schools at Bootham, York, and Leighton Park, Reading, and then went on to Balliol College, Oxford, and Leeds University, where he took his medical degree. His training was interrupted by ill health, and he then embarked on a voyage around the world, spending several months in Australia to recuperate.

  It was during this period that he passed the time writing ‘August Heat’, ‘Sambo’, and other early pieces. Some of his more benign tales were printed for the first time in Quaker magazines, like ‘The Angel of Stone’ (in the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner, 1908, which probably would not have accepted any ghost story with horrific content). Here an Oxford don goes church-hunting in No
rmandy and discovers an obscure little church which contains a neglected stone figure of an angel. While clearing away the cobwebs, he finds and takes out three scraps of paper from a hidden recess between the wings . . . but this does not lead to a Jamesian climax.

  Sixteen of these early stories were collected in Midnight House and Other Tales, published by J.M. Dent in 1910, when Harvey was twenty-five. The title story features a traveller who spends a night at a lonely inn on the moors (a favourite situation in these tales), and endures two nightmares which parallel the birth and death of a child during the same night.

  In ‘Sarah Bennet’s Possession’, a Quaker widow of saintly character is contacted in different ways by the spirit of her wastrel husband, late of the Indian army. ‘Across the Moors’ is Harvey’s most traditional ghost story, in which a spectral clergyman accompanies a woman across lonely moorland. ‘Unwinding’ is a sequence game with an amazing coincidence implied in the climax—Harvey used the identical plot in a much later story, ‘The Vicar’s Web’.

  ‘Sambo’ describes the behaviour of a little girl who, under a mysterious compulsion, sacrifices her old dolls to her newest doll, believed to be a small puppet or idol from Africa. The reader is left to decide if this is a case of subconscious infantile sadism, or if there may still be some innate uncanny power left in Sambo. ‘The Tortoise’ is another memorable horror tale, among the best of those that have not been reprinted in later collections (until now). A servant records in his diary that the spirit of his late master, Sir James, continues to live on in a strange and malevolent tortoise that has an uncanny resemblance to the dead man.

  The highlight of this first collection is undoubtedly ‘August Heat’, in which the artist James Clarence Withencroft describes one blisteringly hot August day in his diary, and discovers a tombstone with his name engraved on it, complete with birth and death dates, by a monumental mason. The editor Alexander Laing (in his landmark anthology, The Haunted Omnibus, 1937) described ‘August Heat’ as ‘one of the most ingenious stories I have ever read . . .We are concerned here with a double coincidence, which, ghosts or no ghosts, could happen. Whether or not it did happen is a question we are inclined to forget in the fascination of a suspended climax of the first order’. The stifling heat ‘is enough to send a man mad’, leaving the reader to ponder another case of inconclusive madness.

  After 1910 Harvey became keenly interested in the adult education movement and went to Selly Oak, Birmingham, to assist Tom Bryan with the Working Men’s College at Fircroft. At the outbreak of World War One he was one of the first to join the Quaker training camp at Jordans, and went with the first detachment of the Friends’ Ambulance Unit to Flanders. Later he undertook much vital work as surgeon-lieutenant in the navy.

  Shortly before the end of the war, Harvey was awarded the Albert Medal for Gallantry by King George V. The official account of his heroism (recorded in The Times on 30th October 1918) runs as follows:

  ‘On 28th June 1918, two of His Majesty’s torpedo-boat destroyers were in collision, and Surgeon-Lieutenant Harvey was sent to board the more seriously damaged destroyer in order to render assistance to the injured. On hearing that a stoker petty officer was pinned by the arm in a damaged compartment, Surgeon-Lieutenant Harvey immediately went down and amputated the arm, this being the only means of freeing the petty officer. The boiler room at the time was flooded, and full of fumes from the escaping oil. This alone constituted a great danger to anyone in the compartment, and Surgeon-Lieutenant Harvey collapsed from this cause after performing the operation, and had to be hauled out of the compartment. . . . Surgeon-Lieutenant Harvey displayed the greatest gallantry and disregard of his personal safety in descending into the damaged compartment, and continuing to work there amidst the oil fumes at a time when the ship was liable to sink.’

  Only when Harvey was awarded the Albert Medal did his family and friends learn how he had risked his life to save the engineer. His lungs were badly damaged by the poisonous oil fumes, and he never fully recovered from the experience.

  After the war Harvey married Margaret Henderson, daughter of John Henderson, who for many years was secretary of the National Liberal Club and the Omar Khayyam Society. Two of his brothers were now achieving some fame as writers: Thomas Edmund Harvey, member of Parliament for West Leeds, and later of the Combined English Universities, and John Wilfred Harvey, professor of philosophy at Leeds University.

  Harvey’s second book, The Misadventures of Athelstan Digby, was published in 1920, closely followed by a privately printed collection of poems, Laughter and Ghosts. He also completed a short novel, Cumber Priory, set in a private boarding school haunted by a singing voice, but this was never accepted for publication. Four years after the war Harvey returned to Fircroft as warden of the Working Men’s College, but once again ill health supervened, and he had to retire at the age of forty. During a subsequent long stay in Switzerland and later in his sickbed at home in Weybridge, he wrote most of the short stories that appeared in The Beast with Five Fingers (1928) and Moods and Tenses (1933).

  ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, undoubtedly Harvey’s best known tale, originally appeared in the first volume of six New Decameron anthologies in 1919 (published in Oxford by Basil Blackwell), and nine years later became the title-story of his second collection. For this 1928 volume he completely altered and rewrote the first two pages of the story, and deleted several lines from the second half (which are now restored in the present volume). The original text was reprinted in Laing’s anthology The Haunted Omnibus, but otherwise it has been the revised 1928 text most constantly reprinted during the past eighty years.

  This is certainly the most famous of all supernatural tales in the sub-genre of the animated severed hand, but by no means the first. Earlier examples include J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’, Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Hand’, and Richard Marsh’s ‘The Adventure of Lady Wishaw’s Hand’.

  Eccentric bachelor Adrian Borlsover goes blind at fifty, but is favoured with a peculiarly delicate sense of touch. He maintains a keen interest in botany, and ‘the mere passing of his long supple fingers over a flower was sufficient means for its identification’. Not long before his death, his right hand appears to develop an independent personality and forges a message requesting that it be severed after the old man’s death and sent to his nephew, Eustace Borlsover. The rest of the story is excellently told, with Eustace chasing and fighting the malevolent hand until it finally causes his death in what appears to be an accidental fire. The hand’s mode of progress resembles that of ‘a geometer caterpillar, the fingers humped up one moment, flattened out the next; the thumb appeared to give a crab-like motion to the whole’. It is suggested that the fingered beast may be animated by the spirit of a sinister pagan-worshipping eighteenth-century ancestor.

  Unlike the majority of Harvey’s tales, ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’ is genuinely supernatural, as several other people besides Eustace, including his best friend and various servants, witness the beast in motion. Eustace’s pet parrot is one of its unfortunate victims, when the thumb and forefinger squeeze it to death.

  Various psychoanalytical critics have not been slow in pointing out that animated limbs and hands ‘spring from their association with the castration complex’ (quoting Sigmund Freud)! Maurice Richardson, in his controversial essay ‘The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories’ (Twentieth Century, December 1959), which concentrated mainly on Harvey and M.R. James in greater depth than before, conjectured that Borlsover was a really significant name for a castrated, displaced father figure.

  Another well-known tale in this collection that has strong echoes of both James and Le Fanu is ‘The Ankardyne Pew’. A gloomy old house is haunted by strange sounds, including bird noises. These manifestations are described in passages from an 1890 diary, but the full explanation is discovered only later, in an entry from the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1789.

  ‘The Clock’ is a typically inconclusive stor
y in the same vein as Walter de la Mare’s ‘A Recluse’. A strange woman acquaintance asks the narrator to collect her travel clock, which she had left behind in her house two weeks previously. The clock, which in theory should have stopped, is found completely wound up inside the locked bedroom, and there is a strange impression on the bed. Then an unearthly sound is heard ‘of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop’, followed by a curious scratching noise against the bedroom door.

  In ‘The Devil’s Bridge’, a stranger (probably the Devil) builds a bridge across a river in a French village and claims the soul of the first person to cross to the other side. In ‘Two and a Third’, a successful séance reveals a hidden connection between a woman’s dead son and her companion. ‘Ghosts and Jossers’, set during the First World War, is a subtle title signifying the losers and winners of a word game in which the losers ‘die’. These three tales are among Harvey’s least known and rarely reprinted stories.

  The same collection also featured some borderline supernatural tales (‘The Tool’, ‘Peter Levisham’, ‘Six to Six Thirty’) and is especially noteworthy for the inclusion of two of Harvey’s intensely sinister old women. ‘Miss Avenal’ is a spiritual vampire, an old lady who seems to drain away her young nurse’s energy and beauty, and replaces them with her own memories. The nurse becomes an inmate of a special wing in a euphemistically termed ‘rest home’.