by M. R. James
COUNT MAGNUS
By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story cameinto my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from thesepages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a statementof the form in which I possess them.
They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book oftravels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties andfifties. Horace Marryat's _Journal of a Residence in Jutland and theDanish Isles_ is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. Thesebooks usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. Theywere illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details ofhotel accommodation and of means of communication, such as we now expectto find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely inreported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, andgarrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.
Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers asthey progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personalexperience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, ofits termination.
The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to dependentirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deducethat he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, andvery much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode inEngland, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is probablethat he entertained the idea of settling down at some future time whichnever came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in theearly seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have thrownlight on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to property of histhat was warehoused at that establishment.
It is further apparent that Mr Wraxall had published a book, and that ittreated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this Icannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographicalworks has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously orunder a pseudonym.
As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficialopinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seemsthat he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford--Brasenose, as Ijudge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that ofover-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly afault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end.
On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago, hadstruck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some oldbooks of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him thatthere was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden, interspersedwith episodes from the history of some of the great Swedish families. Heprocured letters of introduction, therefore, to some persons of qualityin Sweden, and set out thither in the early summer of 1863.
Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of hisresidence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collectionof family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-housein Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.
The manor-house, or _herrgard_, in question is to be called Rabaeck(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It isone of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the pictureof it in Dahlenberg's _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in 1694,shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It was built soonafter 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English house ofthat period in respect of material--red-brick with stone facings--andstyle. The man who built it was a scion of the great house of De laGardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is the name bywhich I will designate them when mention of them becomes necessary.
They received Mr Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressedhim to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing inSwedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out quitesufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months. Thisarrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the manor-houseof something under a mile. The house itself stood in a park, and wasprotected--we should say grown up--with large old timber. Near it youfound the walled garden, and then entered a close wood fringing one ofthe small lakes with which the whole country is pitted. Then came thewall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll--a knob of rocklightly covered with soil--and on the top of this stood the church,fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to Englisheyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and galleries.In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily painted, andwith silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by aseventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous 'Last Judgement',full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, andbrown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung from the roof; thepulpit was like a doll's-house covered with little painted wooden cherubsand saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was hinged to the preacher'sdesk. Such sights as these may be seen in many a church in Sweden now,but what distinguished this one was an addition to the original building.At the eastern end of the north aisle the builder of the manor-house haderected a mausoleum for himself and his family. It was a largisheight-sided building, lighted by a series of oval windows, and it had adomed roof, topped by a kind of pumpkin-shaped object rising into aspire, a form in which Swedish architects greatly delighted. The roof wasof copper externally, and was painted black, while the walls, in commonwith those of the church, were staringly white. To this mausoleum therewas no access from the church. It had a portal and steps of its own onthe northern side.
Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than threeor four minutes bring you to the inn door.
On the first day of his stay at Rabaeck Mr Wraxall found the church dooropen, and made these notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Intothe mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by lookingthrough the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble effigies andsarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament, which made himvery anxious to spend some time in investigation.
The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of justthe kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, verycarefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesquedetail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capableman. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period ofdistress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked severalchateaux and done some damage. The owner of Rabaeck took a leading part insupressing trouble, and there was reference to executions of ring-leadersand severe punishments inflicted with no sparing hand.
The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in thehouse, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his day'swork. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that the faceimpressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or goodness; infact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost phenomenally ugly man.
On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked backin the late but still bright evening.
'I must remember,' he writes, 'to ask the sexton if he can let me intothe mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for Isaw him tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking orunlocking the door.'
I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversationwith his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he doessurprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was readingwere, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book he wasmeditating, and that it was to have been one of those quasi-journalisticproductions which admit of the introduction of an admixture ofconversati
onal matter.
His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of CountMagnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman'sactivity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or not.He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his tenantscame late to their work on the days which they owed to him as Lord of theManor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and branded in themanor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who had occupiedlands which encroached on the lord's domain, and whose houses had beenmysteriously burnt on a winter's night, with the whole family inside. Butwhat seemed to dwell on the innkeeper's mind most--for he returned to thesubject more than once--was that the Count had been on the BlackPilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.
You will naturally inquire, as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimagemay have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfiedfor the time being, just as his did. The landlord was evidently unwillingto give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the point, and, beingcalled out for a moment, trotted out with obvious alacrity, only puttinghis head in at the door a few minutes afterwards to say that he wascalled away to Skara, and should not be back till evening.
So Mr Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day's work at the manor-house.The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his thoughts intoanother channel, for he had to occupy himself with glancing over thecorrespondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm and her marriedcousin Ulrica Leonora at Rabaeck in the years 1705-10. The letters were ofexceptional interest from the light they threw upon the culture of thatperiod in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has read the full edition ofthem in the publications of the Swedish Historical ManuscriptsCommission.
In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes inwhich they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, verynaturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order todetermine which of them had best be his principal subject ofinvestigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly bya collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus.But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of alchemical andother tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiarwith alchemical literature, Mr Wraxall spends much space which he mighthave spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the varioustreatises: The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of theToad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth; and then heannounces with a good deal of circumstance his delight at finding, on aleaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing ofCount Magnus himself headed 'Liber nigrae peregrinationis'. It is truethat only a few lines were written, but there was quite enough to showthat the landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least asold as the time of Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is theEnglish of what was written:
'If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithfulmessenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that heshould first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute theprince....' Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughlydone, so that Mr Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading itas _aeris_ ('of the air'). But there was no more of the text copied, onlya line in Latin: _Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora_. (Seethe rest of this matter among the more private things.)
It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon thetastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him bynearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to hisgeneral forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, onlymade him a more picturesque figure, and when, after a rather prolongedcontemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall set out on hishomeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had noeyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of thewoods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden hepulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate ofthe churchyard, and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes fell onthe mausoleum.
'Ah,' he said, 'Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to seeyou.'
'Like many solitary men,' he writes, 'I have a habit of talking to myselfaloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expectan answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case, there wasneither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I suppose, wascleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on the floor, whoseclang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound enough.'
That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall saythat he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called inSweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the innparlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for thenext day, and a little general conversation ensued.
Mr Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is toteach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his ownmemory on a Biblical point.
'Can you tell me,' he said, 'anything about Chorazin?'
The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village hadonce been denounced.
'To be sure,' said Mr Wraxall; 'it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?'
'So I expect,' replied the deacon. 'I have heard some of our old priestssay that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales--'
'Ah! what tales are those?' Mr Wraxall put in.
'Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten,' said the deacon; andsoon after that he said good night.
The landlord was now alone, and at Mr Wraxall's mercy; and that inquirerwas not inclined to spare him.
'Herr Nielsen,' he said, 'I have found out something about the BlackPilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Countbring back with him?'
Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps thelandlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that thelandlord spent at least one minute in looking at him before he saidanything at all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good dealof effort he spoke:
'Mr Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more--not anymore. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather'stime--that is, ninety-two years ago--there were two men who said: "TheCount is dead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and have a freehunt in his wood"--the long wood on the hill that you have seen behindRabaeck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: "No, do not go;we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not be walking.They should be resting, not walking." These men laughed. There were noforestmen to keep the wood, because no one wished to live there. Thefamily were not here at the house. These men could do what they wished.
'Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sittinghere in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the windowopen, he could see out to the wood, and hear.
'So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. Atfirst they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone--you know how faraway it is--they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part ofhis soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold ofeach other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they hearsomeone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him laugh outloud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and, indeed, theyhave all of them said that it was not any man at all. After that theyhear a great door shut.
'Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the priest.They said to him:
'"Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men,Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn."
'You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went tothe wood--my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like somany dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. Hesaid when they came to him:
&nb
sp; '"I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If Icannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again."
'So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of thewood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and allthe time he was pushing with his hands--pushing something away from himwhich was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and tookhim to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but he wenton pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he wasdead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once abeautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of itwas sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My grandfather didnot forget that. And they laid him on the bier which they brought, andthey put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked before; and theybegan to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they could. So, as theywere singing the end of the first verse, one fell down, who was carryingthe head of the bier, and the others looked back, and they saw that thecloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up,because there was nothing to close over them. And this they could notbear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade,and they buried him in that place.'
The next day Mr Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon afterhis breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He noticed thatthe key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the pulpit, and itoccurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be left unlocked as arule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a second and more privatevisit to the monuments if there proved to be more of interest among themthan could be digested at first. The building, when he entered it, hefound not unimposing. The monuments, mostly large erections of theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were dignified if luxuriant, andthe epitaphs and heraldry were copious. The central space of the domedroom was occupied by three copper sarcophagi, covered withfinely-engraved ornament. Two of them had, as is commonly the case inDenmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifix on the lid. The third, that ofCount Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead of that, a full-length effigyengraved upon it, and round the edge were several bands of similarornament representing various scenes. One was a battle, with cannonbelching out smoke, and walled towns, and troops of pikemen. Anothershowed an execution. In a third, among trees, was a man running at fullspeed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed astrange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended itfor a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude, or whether itwas intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view of the skillwith which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined toadopt the latter idea. The figure was unduly short, and was for the mostpart muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part ofthe form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any handor arm. Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, andcontinues: 'On seeing this, I said to myself, "This, then, which isevidently an allegorical representation of some kind--a fiend pursuing ahunted soul--may be the origin of the story of Count Magnus and hismysterious companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtlessit will be a demon blowing his horn.'" But, as it turned out, there wasno such sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on ahillock, who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with aninterest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.
Mr Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks--three innumber--which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was detached,and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the deacon longeror to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward to themanor-house.
'It is curious,' he notes, 'how, on retracing a familiar path, one'sthoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I wasgoing (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy theepitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and foundmyself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe,singing or chanting some such words as, "Are you awake, Count Magnus? Areyou asleep, Count Magnus?" and then something more which I have failed torecollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in thisnonsensical way for some time.'
He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, andcopied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until thelight began to fail him.
'I must have been wrong,' he writes, 'in saying that one of the padlocksof my Counts sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that two areloose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge,after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is stillfirm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot guess how it isopened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost afraid I should havetaken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It is strange, the interestI feel in the personality of this, I fear, somewhat ferocious and grimold noble.'
The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall's stay atRabaeck. He received letters connected with certain investments which madeit desirable that he should return to England; his work among the paperswas practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided, therefore, tomake his farewells, put some finishing touches to his notes, and be off.
These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more timethan he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying todine with them--they dined at three--and it was verging on half past sixbefore he was outside the iron gates of Rabaeck. He dwelt on every step ofhis walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he trod itfor the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And when hereached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for many minutes,gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and distant, all darkbeneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned to go, the thoughtstruck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as well asthe rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but twenty yards away, andhe knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It was not long before hewas standing over the great copper coffin, and, as usual, talking tohimself aloud: 'You may have been a bit of a rascal in your time,Magnus,' he was saying, 'but for all that I should like to see you, or,rather--'
'Just at that instant,' he says, 'I felt a blow on my foot. Hastilyenough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash.It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened thesarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and--Heaven is my witness that I amwriting only the bare truth--before I had raised myself there was a soundof metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards.I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life stay forone moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I canwrite--almost as quickly as I could have said--the words; and whatfrightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I sithere in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twentyminutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I cannottell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something morethan I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight Iam not able to remember. What is this that I have done?'
* * * * *
Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day, ashe had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I gatherfrom his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man. One of theseveral small note-books that have come to me with his papers gives, nota key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journeywas made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts toenumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of thiskind:
24. Pastor of village in Skane. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhaettan. Black cloak, brown hat.
26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed
hat, very old-fashioned.
This entry is lined out, and a note added: 'Perhaps identical with No.13. Have not yet seen his face.' On referring to No. 13, I find that heis a Roman priest in a cassock.
The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight peopleappear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloakand broad hat, and another a 'short figure in dark cloak and hood'. Onthe other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers appearat meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and the shortfigure is certainly absent.
On reaching England, it appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, andthat he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some personor persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come toregard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle--it was a closedfly--not trusting the railway and drove across country to the village ofBelchamp St Paul. It was about nine o'clock on a moonlight August nightwhen he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of thewindow at the fields and thickets--there was little else to beseen--racing past him. Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the cornertwo figures were standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; thetaller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see theirfaces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the horseshied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr Wraxall sank back intohis seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before.
Arrived at Belchamp St Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decentfurnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on thisday. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full,but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit fromhis pursuers--how or when he knows not--and his constant cry is 'What hashe done?' and 'Is there no hope?' Doctors, he knows, would call him mad,policemen would laugh at him. The parson is away. What can he do but lockhis door and cry to God?
People still remember last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strangegentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next morningbut one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury thatviewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't speakto what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God; and how thepeople as kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week, and went away fromthat part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of light hasever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so happened thatlast year the little house came into my hands as part of a legacy. It hadstood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so Ihad it pulled down, and the papers of which I have given you an abstractwere found in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom.
