Autoepitaphy

1

'You were right, Warden, beyond doubt in shutting the show down in such circumstances. The annoying thing is that they never let me know.'

'If they had, though, we shouldn't have had you with us tonight: so you mustn't expect us to regret their omission!'

The scene is the Senior Common Room of Selham College, Oxbridge, and the preceding remarks have passed between Greville Tempest, the warden, and Cyril Hunslow, sometime resident fellow and history tutor, but now librarian and occasional master at distant Penchester.

'We've never really forgiven you for leaving us,' continued the warden; 'a man of your calibre's wasted on a public school.'

'Well, it's nice of you to miss me, but I've found more time for my writing and research there than ever I managed to get to myself here. I should never have got through the stuff for those two last books of mine outside the peace of Penchester! I owe more than I can say to the old aunt who left me Little Court and the money to live there. By the way, when are you coming down to stay with me again?'

'Very soon, I hope. I hear they've rebuilt your cathedral organ.'

'Now then, keep off music, please!' interposed Brisson, the sub-warden. 'We had quite enough talk of Bach and Beethoven and the rest of them last night. What I want to know is why should the closing down of the College Psychical Society, owing to the pranks of a pack of young fools, prevent us from hearing whatever Hunslow was going to tell 'em tonight?'

'An excellent idea! Yes, please do read us your paper, Hunslow. We got talking about ghosts here last week and nearly had a rough house.'

'Merely because,' explained old Harsleigh the chaplain, 'I endeavoured to suggest to certain of my more junior colleagues that a correct valuation of psychical data depends upon a nice discrimination between what is objective and what subjective.'

'And merely because,' exploded a young don with red hair and a freckled face, 'I pointed out that those terms connoted a distinction without a difference. To the idealist among philosophers the objective may be said to be subjective, and to the sensationalist in psychology the opposite is the case. If only Mr Harsleigh would stick to his theology and leave...'

'No more, Nicholls, please. We can't go ranging again over all that ground. Now, Hunslow, if you'll read us your paper I promise you a quiet audience in spite of these disputants.'

'Well, if you really want to hear it, I'll go upstairs and fetch it. It won't detain you for more than twenty minutes or so; and there's nothing in it that can't be explained in three or four different ways. So everyone will be welcome to his own theory and solution!'

While Hunslow is away they stoke the fire, pull their seats into a semicircle in front of it, and set the big leather armchairs at either end for the warden and the reader. Except for the heavily shaded reading lamp on a small table at the latter's side all lights are extinguished. The reading then begins.

2

A RECORD OF CERTAIN EVENTS ASSOCIATED BY THE WRITER WITH A DESK

by Cyril Hunslow
I have chosen the title of this paper carefully. It does not imply that the events which I shall narrate were of themselves connected with a writing desk, but only that I have associated them therewith. Whether the interconnection goes any further than that I must leave to your judgment. I only know that for myself the association will be permanent.

I will begin with four introductions.

First of myself. I am a historian and, as my books will bear witness, a critical historian. I have tried to apply the same critical standards to the preparation of this paper as to the compilation of my histories.

Secondly, of my paternal aunt, the late Mrs Agatha Telling, of Little Court, Penchester, my present home, which she left to me at her death. She was a Victorian lady of common sense and strong mind, and with no fads or fancies about her.

Thirdly, of Mildred Hudson, my aunt's parlour maid and after her decease my housekeeper. She was a gaunt, unimpressionable woman whom her mistress once not inaptly described as a footman in petticoats.

Fourth, and lastly, of the writing desk. It was of mahogany with inlays of patterned ivory on the slanting cover, which when opened and let down onto lateral draw-pins formed the writing board. Somebody, I forget who, once told me that the ivory inlays indicated the workmanship of French prisoners during the Napoleonic Wars. The catalogue of the Penchester Museum, however, to which I recently presented the desk, says nothing as to that; but classifies the piece as 'Miscellaneous: probably late Eighteenth Century'.

The first I remember of this desk was that it occupied a window corner of the almost disused morning room at Little Court. I only knew my aunt open it but once, and that was when on return from a walk with me she found on the hall table a telegram and a pre-paid reply form. Turning into the morning room and sitting at the desk she scribbled a quick reply. 'Here, Cyril,' she said, 'run along with this, will you, to the epitaph office?'

'Epitaph office?'

Did I say epitaph office?' My aunt seemed annoyed with herself. 'Of course I meant telegraph office. This wretched old desk always makes me talk and write nonsense!'

The inconsequence of this explanation of her mistake never occurred to me at the time. I was far too polite and politic a youngster ever to question the veracity or validity of an avuncular or auntly utterance. In point of fact I completely forgot her remark until I caught myself in the act of making a very similar one almost twenty years later: when the old lady had recently died and I was making a first entry on my inheritance. Nothing relevant to the subject of this paper happened, at least to my knowledge, in the intervening period.

I was, at the time to which we have now jumped, making a preliminary stay of two nights at Little Court before moving in my few bits of personal furniture. I wanted to see where they would fit in. It was an evening in early July and the daylight still strong enough after supper for me to try which of the four sitting-rooms on the ground floor would best suit my research work and writing. I wished to leave the drawing-room as Aunt Agatha had left it I felt sure that she would have preferred it so. The dining-room was too dark and the hall too open to interruption. There remained, therefore, only the morning-room, which (with substitution of my large writing-table for the too small old desk) would suit admirably. With a view to testing the light, which I like having over my left shoulder, I sat down at the desk, opened it and looked for paper whereon to write. There were no loose sheets, but there was one of those Victorian 'commonplace albums' with pages of different coloured papers, of which some twenty or so had been torn out and the remainder left blank.

Taking up a pen, with my thoughts focused on a future rearrangement of the furniture, I jotted down a few unpremeditated words on the top leaf. The light was quite satisfactory, and I decided to give instructions for my table to be sited exactly where the desk now stood. Before shutting it up again I glanced down at what I had written in the album, and what I saw gave me a little jerk of surprise. This is what I had written:

AUTOEPITAPHY
being a Miscellany of
MESSAGES FROM THE BEYOND
selected as suitable for engraving upon the
senders' tombs and for edification of the
passing reader: complete with appropriate
titles in superscript, carefully chosen
by The Editor
My first instinct was to ejaculate 'What rubbish!' when those long-forgotten words of my aunt suddenly rushed back on me: 'This wretched old desk always makes me talk and write nonsense.' And then, of course, she too had said something about epitaphs. Ah, yes! now I remembered: 'the epitaph office', that was it! Well, it was getting too dark now in the morning-room; so, having closed the album and shut up the desk, I returned to the cosiness of the drawing room, where curtains were already drawn and the lights lit. Having read the daily papers and two or three chapters of a novel I went to bed well satisfied with my new home.

I always keep on a table at my bedside a number of books and a writing pad; not because I am slow in going to sleep but because I wake early, especially on a bright summer's morning. I did so on the morrow of the events just recorded and, taking up the writing pad, amused myself between six and half-past seven o'clock by trying to compose a few epitaphs and titles for them on the lines of the nonsensical entry which I had made in the old album the night before. I managed with some racking of the brain, and certainly without any inspirational afflatus, to hammer out two; and these, for a reason that I shall shortly explain, I will now read out to you. The first is a message from 'Everyman' and its title 'Ex Nihilo Nihil'.

Producer, actor, audience, in one
I played 'My Life', and lived the parts I played:
The curtain's down; my piece has had its run;
Nothing remains: a shadow leaves no shade.
The second was from 'A Horticulturist' and its title 'In Heaven as it is in Earth'.

Too garish are these bright Elysian fields
Of endless summer and unfading flowers!
Must I then pine while Recollection yields
Solace of cloud and sunset, wind and showers?
No! I have found a corner of the sky
Where soil is heaped, and ash and mulch and mould;
Where leaves still fall, buds burst and blossoms die;
Where the First Gardener gardens as of old!
My reason for reciting these verses is that you will have at once noticed their entire difference in matter and manner from the stuff and style of my writing in the album the previous evening; which must have struck you, as it did me, as redolent of the eighteenth century. Those of you who have read my published metrical efforts—I dare not call them poems—will recognise my two epitaphs as quite of a piece with them. I was, indeed, gratified to find myself so normal on a slightly abnormal theme; and, by the time I had had breakfast and kept an appointment with the headmaster of Penchester regarding my acceptance of the post of School Librarian, I had forgotten all about the old desk and the album within.

Such forgetfulness was not, however, to last for long. On my return to lunch, Hudson (as Mildred desired me to address her in her new dignity of housekeeper) begged my pardon but had I expected any visitor that morning? My negative reply appeared to puzzle her and elicited the comment that in that case it was a most peculiar thing.

'What is peculiar, Hudson?' I enquired.

'Well, sir; you know of them fainting fits as I were telling you of yesterday? While I were in the morning-room and you was out, and I bent my head over the writing-desk to see as whether there weren't no ink in the inkpot which Mrs Telling always said it was my duty for to see to properly, I suddenly come over that giddy and strange that I lay down longways on the sofa and shut my eyes, and whether I goes into a faint or a doze or what not I don't rightly know, but when I opens them again I see a gentleman sitting at the writing-desk and looking hard at that book as is inside of it. He was dressed queer too, just as though he step out of one of them fancy balls; in fact, he looked like a bishop, only worse.'

'What do you mean by "worse", Hudson?' I enquired.

'Well, he had little spindly legs same as a bishop, but were all untucked about the neck and no proper collar to him either. So he sits there laughing at what you had wrote in the book; and it was lucky, I thought to myself, as my dear dead mistress had tore out all her drawings of gravestones with rhymes on 'em as I could never make sense on, nor she neither I reckon, poor lady, for 'tweren't her as done it but the old desk, she would say. Well, sir, as I were a watching the old gentleman what should I do but tumble off the sofa, and when I pulls myself up again there weren't no old gentleman there at all and I minded that I must have been in a dream. But it were peculiar all the same, for my digestion weren't bad this morning and I ain't one to dream on a calm stomach nor in the daytime neither.'

'Don't worry yourself, Hudson,' I replied. 'Most of us have nightmares, and all that you have had is a daymare! There's nothing to be upset about: it's all perfectly natural.'

It is significant, is it not, that a majority of men and women seem to derive comfort from being told that a thing is natural. It is difficult not to infer that most of us tacitly accept the existence of phenomena classifiable in the opposite category!

At this stage of my experience and information in regard to the writing-desk I was no longer sceptical, though I remained acutely critical, of its association with some stimulus or urge towards sepulchral inscriptions. Indeed it wounded my self esteem to have to confess that through lack of adequate mental concentration I had allowed my pen to write words of which I could not consider myself the author. Nor was my discomfiture in any way relieved by Hudson's disclosure that a woman of my late aunt's strength of mind and character had suffered a similar subjection to an uninvited influence. I was glad in fact not to have to broach the subject to Hudson again, as I had already ordered the desk's removal to a big spare bedroom in order to make way for my writing-table downstairs.

In its new venue the desk was quite forgotten by me for some six months after my entry into permanent residence at Little Court. During that time I had no guests to stay, and it was not until after a succession of four visitors had been incommoded by it in the ensuing year that I offered the piece to the Penchester museum and paid for its removal thither. It is not necessary for the purposes of this paper that I should give the names of my four friends, nor have I their permission to do so. It will suffice to call them A, B, C and D.

A is a member of the Indian Civil Service, whose most marked traits are a profound pride—his enemies would call it conceit—in his profession; and a bigoted and militant atheism. He would suffer no criticism, serious or jocular, of either. I therefore studiously avoided both subjects and, as we found plenty to talk about outside of them, did not find their avoidance difficult. I was sorry therefore when on the third day he told me that he must leave on the morrow. He struck me as oddly fidgety and ill at ease in saying goodbye and, as his cab drove off, put his head out of the window to say, 'I'm afraid you'll find I've written some nonsense in your album: please forgive me.' Curiosity carried me quickly upstairs, and opening the album I read as follows:

GLORIA IN EXCELSIS
(from an Indian Civil Servant)
We sons of heaven here agree
Not to appear too fervent;
Each has the honour just to be
God's most obedient Servant.

GOOD FORM
(from an Atheist)
On earth I would mutter a curse on all
Fools who believe in God's essence:
But here it seems rather too personal
To pass such remarks in His presence.
The writing was indubitably in A's firm and readily legible hand; but just as certainly what was written constituted a plain negation of his authorship. It was, to use. Hudson's expression, 'a most peculiar thing'.

B came to stay a month or so after A, and in not removing the album from the desk but leaving it available to subsequent visitors I yielded to my curiosity to see what, if anything, they would write in it. At the time of his visit, B was Bishop's chaplain in a North Country See. He had previously been a country parson in East Anglia and has since become a much respected Archdeacon in the Midlands. I always found him tolerant of criticism of the clergy by the laity and frank but restrained in his reciprocation. The lines which he wrote (and for which unlike A he did not apologise, though he expressed surprise at having produced them) were incongruous in form rather than in substance with his ordinary writings. In the three weeks of his visit he wrote more than a dozen verses, of which I will read out three.

EXCEPT AS A LITTLE CHILD
(from a Lord Bishop)
Complete with mitre, cope and staff
I knock at Heaven's gate:
Why this should make the angels laugh
I cannot explicate.

NOR THY JUDGMENTS MY JUDGMENTS
(from a Minister of Religion)
That God is colour-blind in love
I from the grave forthtell:
My flock's black sheep are penned above,
My white lambs bleat in bell!

IMMORTALITY (from an Undertaker)
I, who with coffin, hearse and bier
Folk to their long rest laid,
Find in this dull and corpseless sphere
An insult to the trade.
I now come to verses written in the hand of C, but so aggressively naive and anachronistic that they at once appeared to me, and still appear, to leap at one straight out of the eighteenth, or very early nineteenth, century. C himself regarded them quite impersonally and apathetically as 'rum stuff'. A person of considerable inherited wealth and of consequent leisure, he was, nevertheless, devoid of any literary accomplishment or discrimination. With the remark that he doubted whether his old aunt (who had left him his money) would have approved of them, he was, apparently, able to dismiss the verses he had written from mind and memory, although he had contributed no fewer than nineteen additions to the album, of which I have selected eight as typical. Here they are:

RE-UNION
(from an Uxoricide)
Who, hanged by neck till I was dead,
Had paid for my wife-murder
Now find the bitch arrived ahead!
Pray, what could be absurder?

REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM
(from a Recidivist)
Did I not sin sans fear or tear
Great sins of rape and arson?
Then why am I detailed to hear
Confessions from a parson?

UNEMPLOYMENT
(from a Courtesan)
For harlotry my soul I sold
On men's desire reliant,
But now must walk the streets of gold
Nor ever find a client.

CONTINUITY'
(from a Politician)
The shams of party strife
Bred falsehood in my breath:
So did I lie through life
Who now lie still in death.

THE MIGHTY FROM THEIR SEATS
(from a Parish Clerk)
When the Duchess was churched, I intoned the response,
'Who putteth Her Ladyship's trust in Thee';
But her faith in the Lord must have suffered mischance
For Her Grace fills no castle in Sion's citie.

REDEMPTION AT PAR
(from a Company Promoter)
Unwanted? I? So good at schemes
To make thrice two look seven!
In need of no prospectus seems
The Company of Heaven!

SADISM
(from an Usher)
The bad boys made me sad; the worse
Sadder (thou rightly addest);
But daily flogging his obverse,
The worst boy made me saddest.

CYNOLATRY
(from a Dog Fancier)
No dogs allowed? No room for 'Squaw',
My friend I loved so well?
Too well,' St Peter said, 'and more
Than God: so Heaven's your Hell!'
The final entry to be made in the album before the desk's removal to the museum brought me face to face with tragedy. D had for many years been my greatest friend; and, as soon as I heard that his doctor had ordered him a complete rest and change of scene, I telegraphed an invitation to stay at Little Court. His rapid success at the Bar had led to overwork of both brain and nerve, and he had never been of really strong physique. Nevertheless, on meeting him at the station, I noticed none of the pallor or decline that I had expected in one sent for a rest-cure. On the contrary, D's complexion was florid and he appeared to walk and talk at full steam. It was unfortunate that I was reassured thereby into letting him sit up late in discussion and argument. I need not blame myself, however, for I heard later that his condition had puzzled even the specialists and that he was far from being what medicos call a straightforward case. It was a long way past one o'clock when we bade each other 'goodnight' in the upstairs corridor; and his last words to me were: 'Well, I feel a different man after our talk! Quite like old times, eh?'

At seven-thirty next morning I was awakened by Hudson knocking at my door to say that she was afraid that poor Mr D had been took very queer, and would I ring up for the doctor? To cut this sad story short, severe cardiac symptoms were diagnosed and my dear friend entered upon what could only be described as four months of protracted death before his final release. Two days after this collapse, he was removed, at his own request, to a nursing home run by a cousin of his at Davenham-on-Sea.

On my return from seeing him into the train—in which the doctor had arranged for him to be accompanied by a trained nurse—I found Mildred Hudson in tears. She hadn't meant to pry into what weren't nohow her concern; but would I go upstairs and see what the poor gentleman had written in that book? I of course did so and, from a shaky scrawl, deciphered the following:

Sham epitaphs I will not dare to write
In vein jocose: for I may die tonight.
This pain that stabs me through from chest to back
Must be precursor of a heart attack.
All I can offer is this sage advice,
'Cling hard to life: for dying is not nice!'
The grief caused me by these lines was not without remorse that I had not removed the album or locked the desk before D came. I sat down straightway and wrote a letter offering the desk to the Museum Committee. Pending their reply, I had it carried down and placed in the dark cupboard under the stairs. I had come suddenly to hate the sight of it.

It was six months or more after D's death, by which time I had succeeded in forgetting about the old desk and its associations, that, in my rearrangement of the School Library, I came across a portfolio docketed: 'Some materials for a history of Penchester'. Inside was a large number of unindexed and unarranged papers in print and manuscript; most of them belonging to the first half of the nineteenth century. On a cursory inspection they seemed of very unequal interest; but everything is grist to the mill of the historian, and I began placing them in chronological order as a first step towards a more thorough examination. A folio to which my attention was drawn by its unusual calligraphy, was headed: 'An Appreciation of our Cathedral Clergy, with a Short Note on Doctor Ermytage'. The clerical appreciations were nauseating examples of polysyllabic flattery; so that I turned with relief to the curt and crisp note on Dr Ermytage, which proved very far from appreciative. It is important to my purpose, and I will therefore read it to you in full:

Anselm Ermytage came to our organ anno 1795 and obiit 1806. Upon that instrument he would discourse sweet harmonies, but proved himself an organ of great discord in our midst. His quarrel with the Dean arose in the matter of music for Magnificat, whereof he set the whole to soft and sad melodies save only the sentences 'He shall put down the mighty from their seat' and 'the rich He shall send empty away'; the which he put to a great shouting by the quire with much noise upon the organ. Now the Dean's prohibition of this music lay upon the ground that singing after such sort made of the holy canticle of the Virgin nought but a dangerous song of revolution and contempt for the nobility. Wherein, Doctor Beven had the support of all persons of decent birth and superior understanding, but Dr Ermytage took his discipline so ill that he spread abroad an epitaph against the Dean's death, which he hoped might be soon, and vented therein his spleen upon the whole people of Penchester. The words of his lampoon, which few accounted wit, ran thus:

Such as knew Dean Beven well
Doubt not he has gone to hell.
Do not pity Doctor Beven,
After Penchester 'tis Heaven.

Whereafter he wrote many and diverse false epitaphs to the scandal of our city and to the sad annoyance of the dean and chapter. Moreover, upon his death, it was discovered in his testament that these and many more wicked verses had been set apart by him in his desk for posthumous printing, to which end he charged upon his estate the sum of one hundred guineas. But, upon the advice of his attorney, Mr William Telling of Little Court in this City (who became sole executor under this will after the death of the other, which had been Mr Mathew Bilney) did destroy these verses by fire and paid the whole amount aforesaid into the Bishop's chest for the sick and needy. And this he did notwithstanding a solemn caution in the said testament contained that, failing due and faithful execution thereof, the testator reserved the right of personal enactment. Of this solemn caution the attorney made light, holding that it was vain and beyond the law and impatient of a wise interpretation: but in late life Mr Telling was wont to confess that he doubted his action had been right and that he did not care to sit at the desk wherein the verses had been left by Dr Ermytage.
'That, gentlemen,' said Hunslow, 'concludes my paper. I will gladly answer, to the best of my ability, any question that you may wish to put to me. But any attempt at explanation I must leave to your more experienced judgment in such matters. As an historian I have endeavoured to present as true and full account of a series of events as my sources of information and experience permit. Beyond that I cannot go. I thank you for your patient hearing of what has been a longer paper than I anticipated when I accepted your invitation to write and read it.'

3

There was silence for a minute or so after the reading of the paper, during which its author leant forward and self-consciously poked the fire.

'I speak for us all, Hunslow,' said the warden, 'when I say that we've thoroughly enjoyed your paper. For myself, I confess that its literary transcends its psychical interest.'

'I'm not so sure about that!' exclaimed Nicholls, getting up and moving towards the electric-light switches. 'Hunslow's story needs examination in the cold bright light of reason. This spooky glimmer of the fire and huddling of shadows on the ceiling make for imagination and credulity. Let us, therefore, indulge in the symbolism of turning on the lights!'

There was a clicking of switches, a momentary flash, the splutter of a blown fuse, and a sudden relapse into gloom.

'As none of you have any questions,' Hunslow said, 'I think, if the warden will allow me, I'll be turning in now. Good-night!'

Clarke,
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