Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) has a big reputation in literary circles with the monumental The Oxford Book Of English Verse 1250–1900, a book out of which Horace Rumpole loves to quote Wordsworth. But AQC also has a smaller reputation as a ghost story writer. His ghostly works are peppered through books like:
I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter’s Tales (1893)
Wandering Heath: Stories, Studies, and Sketches (1895)
Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (1900)
The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales (1902)
Two Sides of the Face: Winter Stories (1903)
Shakespeare’s Christmas and Other Stories (1905)
If you like them all in one place you can try The Horror on the Stair and Other Weird Tales (2000) from Ash-Tree Press.
The big mystery for me is “The Seventh Man” in Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts (1900). This tale is set in the North and is written about with much authority. The only problem is I can’t find any info on AQC ever going to Canada. Many English middle class men in their youths would go to Canada to work on railroads or in the bush, but I guess AQC was not one of them.
“The Seventh Man” has six men huddled in their cabin, waiting out the terrible cold and darkness of the Arctic winter. They are the remainders of a sailing crew from the J. R. MacNeill, a ship that sank. (Some of the fire wood the men burn came from their ship.) They watch each day for the return of the sun to keep them sane. Quiller-Couch gives some names and others nicknames, and seems to be almost obsessed about cataloguing them. (This will prove important.) Alexander Williamson, known as The Gaffer, David Faed, George Lashman, Long Ede, Charles Silchester known as the Snipe, and Daniel Cooney.
There was a seventh man in their crew, Bill, who is dead and buried under the ground and snow.
The men occupy their time in different ways. The Gaffer prays and reads either the Bible, Paradise Lost or a trashy Gothic type novel called “The Turkish Spy”. Lashman lies in bed groaning with illness, (with Cooney telling him to be quiet all the time) while Faed and the Snipe play cards. The lot of them are all going stir crazy with cabin fever.
Suddenly a noise gets all their attention. Something is outside their cabin door. They think it’s a polar bear. They try to peak out and see. Whatever it is, it tries the door latch but can’t come in for the door is well-bolted.
Long Ede goes up into the loft with a rifle to see if he can shoot the animal. He sees nothing and sits with a sleeping bag to wait for another appearance. When he sees something off behind a hillock he climbs down and investigates the door first. There are human footprints all about the doorstep, each filled with drops of blood. He covers the tracks so his cabin-mates don’t see them in the morning and lose their minds. He then moves off to the hillock to investigate, covering tracks as he goes.
The next morning the men are waking when they realize Long Ede has not returned. They climb up into the loft but he is gone. The Gaffer pulls on a jumper and opens the door to find him. Long Ede is lying across the doorway. They get him inside and give him rum and warm him up with blankets. He tries to tell them what he saw but can’t. The Gaffer sees he has experienced some awesome power or terror. Long Ede spends his time counting the men in the cabin. He keeps saying there are seven of them when there is only six.
He does this for days but everybody ignores it because they have all started to feel less afraid, happier and likely to burst into song. The Snipe goes up into the loft to retrieve the forgotten sleeping bag and cheers: “Boys! boys!–the Sun!” The men have survived the gloom of winter.
The denouement happens months later in June, when the whaling fleet returns. Long Ede thinks he had seen a hallucination (which he can’t pronounce) but The Gaffer knows better. There had been a seventh man in the cabin, Jesus their savior.
I’ll be honest, I loath ghost stories that end on a happy note. E. F. Benson ruined a masterpiece called “How Fear Departed the Long Gallery”. He had an absolute corker with people dying if they saw the ghost twins, then guts it with a happy resolution. I am a confirmed M. R. Jamesian on this— ghost need to be nasty. Even worse than a happy ending is a religious one. Whatever you believe aside, a good ghost story has to be more than an episode of Touched By An Angel.
My own prejudice or way-of-thinking worked against me on this one. I have read so many DC horror comics where a bad guy kills his partner and gets zombie or ghost revenged so that I automatically went there. I was expecting Bill to crawl out of his grave at the very least. Those bloody footprints could have been from Jamesian ghosts of Inuit children (instead of bloody from Christ’s sigmata, I assume). I would have preferred some Lovecraftian Gnoph-keh or Dan Simmons bear monster to slowly devour each man in the cabin. The rare bit of morbidness is when The Gaffer is thinking about if they all die, who will be the last man who will remain unburied.
So how did AQC write about the North with such knowledge. Unlike Jack London or Rex Beach, he wasn’t in the Klondike. Unlike Algernon Blackwood, he never went moose hunting in Labrador. I have to assume he did it through research. Something Quiller-Couch was good at. He did write the novel Fort Amity, A Story of French Canadian Life in the Time of Wolfe and Montcalm (1904). Should I keep reading AQC in hopes of scarier stuff?
Grove Kogar pointed me to this one, how this Northern legend may have inspired AQC. Thank Grove.
