NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE Read online

  NIGHTS

  OF THE

  ROUND TABLE

  Margery Lawrence

  NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE

  ISBN: 9781553102960 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102977 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  First electronic edition 2013

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1998

  First published 1926

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  This edition © Ash-Tree Press 2013

  Introduction © Richard Dalby

  Cover artwork © Paul Lowe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada

  CONENTS

  Introduction by Richard Dalby

  January

  Vlasto’s Doll

  February

  Robin’s Rath

  March

  The Woozle

  April

  Floris and the Soldan’s Daughter

  May

  The Fifteenth Green

  June

  How Pan Came to Little Ingleton

  July

  Death Valley

  August

  The Curse of the Stillborn

  September

  The Fields of Jean-Jacques

  October

  Morag-of-the-Cave

  November

  The White Cat

  December

  The Haunted Saucepan

  Sources

  NIGHTS

  OF THE

  ROUND TABLE

  A Book of Strange Tales

  DEDICATED TO

  THE ONLY SILENT MEMBER OF

  THE ROUND TABLE

  MY WOLFHOUND

  ZACH

  Introduction

  Nights of the Round Table is one of the last remaining completely forgotten great ghost story collections of the 1920s, well deserving comparison with E. F. Benson, A. M. Burrage, H. Russell Wakefield, Eleanor Scott, and other writers in the interbellum 'top ten'.

  Among the huge tally of English ghost story writers of the twentieth century, Margery Lawrence (1889–1969) probably ran her old friend Elliott O'Donnell a close second as an observer of the supernatural in real life. In many articles and books (e.g. Fifty Strangest Stories Ever Told), she related several ‘true’ ghostly happenings from her own experience, and a large number of her best weird fictional tales were closely based on fact. She always claimed to keep in constant communication, via mediums, with her parents (who died in the early 1920s), her husband Arthur Towle, and various close friends and relatives after they died; and she accumulated much detailed information about life ‘on the next rung of the ladder of experience’. She took part in a great many ‘clearings’ of haunted houses, as discussed in her foreword to Ghosts Over England (1953) by R. Thurston Hopkins.

  Her ghost stories were collected in Nights of the Round Table (1926), The Terraces of Night (1932), The Floating Café (1936), with a smaller selection in Strange Caravan (1941) and various anthologies, and concluding with a series featuring psychic detective Miles Pennoyer in Number Seven, Queer Street (1945) and Master of Shadows (1959).

  Among her longer novels occupied with Spiritualism and the hereafter are The Bridge of Wonder (1939), The Rent in the Veil (1951), The Yellow Triangle (1965), Bride of Darkness (1967), and A Residence Afresh (1969).

  Nights of the Round Table is undoubtedly her rarest and least-seen supernatural title, and has evaded nearly every collector and anthologist (never being available on inter-library loan) in Britain, America, and elsewhere. One solitary tale was anthologised in the U.S.A. by August Derleth in The Night Side (1947), and I reprinted three other stories between 1987 and 1991. Otherwise the eight other occult tales in the present volume have remained unknown to modem readers.

  These include the delights of ‘The Woozle’, a ghost seemingly created by the power of suggestion in a child’s mind; ‘The Fifteenth Green’, which recalls Wakefield’s later classic Duncaster golfing tale and is also strongly Jamesian, with a Karswell-type character summoning from the sea ‘Somp’n like a man, but it ain’t a man’ (according to one observer); and the truly memorable ‘Morag-of-the-Cave’, in which the power of a silver crucifix is enforced by Scandinavian runic magic, potent against evils of the sea. This tale is one of the earliest horror stories in the Cthulhu genre (pre-dating most of H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre), with its description of a toad-white shape, ghastly and ‘obscenely awful to see’, communicating in a strange and terrible tongue.

  Like M. R. James’s ghost stories, most of those written by Margery Lawrence feature malevolent and horrific visitations, notably in ‘The Curse of the Stillborn’, in which the headstrong wife of a clergyman defies the funeral rituals of the ancient Egyptian gods and, in the pitch darkness, touches a hand on the table—‘dry and cold and leathery, with sharply pointed nails’—and fearsome terrors quickly ensue. Similarly, the grotesque invisible horror in ‘Death Valley’, all the more chilling through being completely unseen, has few equals in 1920s English ghost stories.

  * * * * *

  Margery Harriet Lawrence was born in Wolverhampton on 8 August 1889, the daughter and only child of Grace (née Banks) and barrister Richard Lawrence (a cousin of my maternal grandfather), and spent most of her early childhood near the Welsh border. She was educated privately, at home and abroad, before moving on to various art schools in Birmingham, London, and Paris.

  Her first book was Songs of Childhood and other verses, a small paperback published in 1913 by Grant Richards, who specialised in a profitable sideline of frequently author-subsidised volumes of poetry running from A Shropshire Lad (1898) by A. E. Housman to Phyllistrats (1913) and The Youth of Beauty (1915) by Cecil Roberts.

  Margery’s verses, and especially her ‘love songs’ from this period, were extremely juvenile, and this volume quickly disappeared without trace. Much later, in her Who’s Who entry, she claimed that Songs of Childhood was published when she was sixteen—rather than twenty-three—which led to a long-held belief in modern reference books that she was born as late as 1896!

  During her twenties, Margery spent several years in Chelsea as a ‘humble art-student’, often describing herself as a ‘Bohemian among Bohemians’. A photograph taken in 1918 shows her in typically elegant pose.

  Around this time she gradually planned a semi-autobiographical ‘Story of the Younger Set—being six months in the life of Jane Lorimer, art student’. Rumours began to circulate that Margery fully intended to expose all ‘the hidden secrets of Chelsea’ with its ‘unspeakable orgies . . . and debauches unequalled in Hollywood’. Margery always denied that she knew anything about ‘wild and secret orgies’, and finally declared: ‘We in Chelsea have neither the money nor the time to “orge” on any really grandiloquent scale!’

  She described the lives of herself and her close artistic friends as ‘sometimes busy, sometimes idle, hard-up, casual, non-particular as to morals, living where and how seems most amusing
or convenient, yet withal with a colourful vitality and gaiety that has a charm all its own.’ Despite much hostility from the older ‘Great Ones of Chelsea’, her novel on the artists’ colony eventually reached print in 1928 under the title Bohemian Glass.

  Margery Lawrence’s first (and only) important commission to illustrate a Christmas ‘gift book’ came in 1921 from William Heinemann. She produced eight watercolour plates and numerous pen-and-ink sketches and decorations, plus an impressive pictorial cover design (showing the piper Rory MacAlpine in silhouette), for The Hills of Ruel and other stories by Fiona Macleod (pseudonym of William Sharp, 1855–1905), whose fantasies in the ‘Celtic Twilight’ mode were still at the height of their popularity.

  W. B. Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1893) had established the term as descriptive of the atmospheric Irish traditional lore with its suggestion of mistiness and mysticism, and its vaguely heroic past, inhabited by fairies, ghosts, and ‘little folk’. William Sharp, who was brought up on the similar related myths and legends of the Scottish western highlands, became a leading practitioner of these Gaelic fantasies and traditions in The Mountain Lovers (1895), The Sin Eater (1895), The Immortal Hour (1900), and several other books.

  Margery Lawrence, with her lifelong passion for Celtic fantasy and the writings of Macleod, as well as writers like Machen and Blackwood, was certainly the ideal artist to illustrate The Hills of Ruel. Her paintings of the little green-folk encircling Manus in the title-story, the funeral pyre in ‘He lay on the Moonlit Sand’, and the naked Morag, are extremely effective. Several of Margery’s own early supernatural stories are clearly inspired by Fiona Macleod’s fantasies in this volume.

  Her illustration of ‘The Tempting of Anne’ by Gloom Achanna (with his satyr-like pointed ears) in ‘The Dàn-Nan-Ròn’ is an exact forerunner of the temptation of Ellen in ‘Robin’s Rath’. The mysterious changeling ‘Morag of the Sea’ in Fiona Macleod’s ‘Fara-Ghaol’ was the obvious model for ‘Morag-of-the-Cave’, one of Margery’s most memorable weird tales just four years later.

  This large quarto edition of The Hills of Ruel was published by Heinneman in October 1921, and simultaneously in New York by Duffield.

  Always a confirmed psychic, Margery Lawrence’s deep interest in Spiritualism—and active communication with the spirit world—began in the early 1920s when she attended several séances controlled by the celebrated mediums Eileen Garrett and Estelle Roberts.

  In her very detailed study of the ‘Other Side’, Ferry Over Jordan (Robert Hale, 1944), she stated that her interest in Spiritualism dated from the precise moment when she ‘saw a near relation three nights after he died, when he gave me specific instructions about the finding of a box containing important papers. They were found precisely where he said . . . Somewhere that man was obviously still “alive”! Somewhere he was thinking of us, anxious to help, caring what happened; in a word, he was still alive somewhere, and I was determined to find out where.’

  It was largely owing to the encouragement of the great journalist and veteran parliamentarian T. P. O’Connor (1848–1929) that Margery Lawrence first began to write professionally, in addition to her artwork. She often contributed to his popular T.P.’s Weekly which did commendable service in fostering a love of reading and providing first steps to literary appreciation.

  After O’Connor’s death, he continued to stay in touch (at great length) with Margery, through the lips of Eileen Garrett, who had never met or heard T. P. during his lifetime—though his distinctive and very individual voice came from her mouth perfectly, leaving no room for any scepticism. His long detailed answer on ‘How it felt like to die’ was fully reproduced in Ferry Over Jordan.

  In the same book Margery Lawrence was anxious to make clear that ‘I am a very normal person, enjoying frocks and food, dancing, theatres, cocktail-and-any-other-parties, and an occasional mild flirtation, as well as most normal women—and I suppose it is because I am so interested in the life of this world that people find it difficult to understand that I am still more interested in any information that I can manage to get concerning the life of the next world!’

  Miss Brandt Adventuress was the first of Margery Lawrence’s many novels to feature a strong-willed fiery heroine, of which the best known is Maddalena (a.k.a. Rosanna) in The Madonna of Seven Moons (1931). Her debut novel, initially serialised in Sovereign magazine before its publication by Hutchinson in April 1923, described a thrilling duel of wits between a detective and a young beautiful adventuress who ‘moved in the highest circles of society’. Hutchinson’s blurb declared: ‘The story of how Miss Brandt falls in love, but nevertheless cannot resist using her lover as an unconscious tool to aid her in robbery, and of the progress and the final result of her duel with the detective, is one of fascinating interest.’

  Coincidentally this book appeared simultaneously with Barbara Cartland’s first novel, Jigsaw, from the same publisher, and both seemed set for long and prolific careers as romantic novelists (primarily for the library market) in the ever-increasing Hutchinson stable.

  However, unlike the supremely confident Cartland, Margery Lawrence always seemed unduly modest, and gently parodied her own lack of confidence in a humorous poem (at the front of Miss Brandt Adventuress) which concluded:

  Fame like great Garvice’s, or Ethel Dell’s

  Is far beyond my ken!

  I merely sit a-driving hopefully

  A very humble pen.

  Frankly of foolishness I’m going to write—

  A frankly foolish clown—

  So, kindly critics, shrug your shoulders, smile,

  And let me gently down!

  She need not have worried: critics and readers alike were very appreciative, and remained faithful during her entire forty-six-year career as a popular novelist. Just six months later, on 17 October 1923, The Tatler carried a fine photograph of the author, shown in profile resplendent in a decorative mantilla, studying an exotic statuette, with the caption: ‘Miss Marjorie Lawrence [sic], whose fascinating novel Miss Brandt Adventuress is nearing its third edition, is by profession an artist and has, as is probably known, devoted herself principally to book illustrations and poster-work.’ (This same issue of The Tatler also included ‘The Room Over the Kitchen’ by A. M. Burrage.)

  The 1923 Christmas Number of The Tatler featured an excellent supernatural horror tale by Margery Lawrence, ‘The Mask’ (illustrated by Hookway Cowles), which re-emerged thirteen years later as ‘The Mask of Sacrifice’ in her third ghost story collection The Floating Café (1936).

  Miss Brandt Adventuress was successful enough to encourage Margery to write another romantic thriller, Red Heels, published by Hutchinson in November 1924. This was the story of Célimène, a seductive French dancer and serial heart-breaker, who is loved by Miles Seward, attaché at the British Embassy in Paris, while still playing off her old lovers, Michel Fournichon and the Vicomte de Maudry, against each other. The author’s note on the half-title ran: ‘. . . your feet are small and beautiful and white, but they should be red-red heels that have danced so ruthlessly on the bleeding hearts of men! . . .’

  A portrait of Célimène—‘drawn from life by M. H. Lawrence’—was reproduced as the frontispiece. Red Heels was almost immediately filmed in Germany under the title Das Spielzeug von Paris (1925), starring Lili Damita as Célimène.

  Besides TP.’s Weekly and The Tatler, Margery Lawrence was a regular contributor to The Premier and the growing family of Hutchinson’s magazines including Sovereign and Woman.

  ‘Robin’s Rath’ appeared in Hutchinson’s Magazine, November 1923, with illustrations by ‘Blam’ [Edmund Blampied, a regular illustrator of E. F. Benson’s spook stories in the same magazine]; and during 1925 a run of her short stories in Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine included ‘The Girl Without a Shadow’ (May), ‘The Curse of the Stillborn’ (June), ‘Morag-of-the-Cave’ (July), and ‘Floris and the Soldan’s Daughter (September); while ‘The House of the Dancing Feet’ appeared in th
e Christmas number of Sovereign that same year.

  Between 1923 and early 1926, Margery Lawrence wrote twenty supernatural short stories, and she now selected a dozen of these to make up her third volume for Hutchinson under the title Nights of the Round Table, knitted together as a series of meetings in a private London club, running through a full year from January to December.

  Apart from her regular visits to the séances of Eileen Garrett and other mediums, Margery was a longtime member of the Ghost Club and several other similar societies. These select groups, especially those of the 1920s, usually comprised only around a dozen members, and obviously inspired her ‘Round Table’ setting. She claimed that Saunderson, the host of the Round Table, was a real person, and ‘his monthly dinners as real as they are good’.

  It is tempting to surmise—though the actuality seems quite unlikely—that Saunderson could be loosely based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had recently opened his Psychic Bookshop very near Westminster Abbey in the summer of 1925. Other possible contenders for the real-life Saunderson are Nandor Fodor, Hannen Swaffer, and the barrister Sir Edward Marshall-Hall (a colleague of her father in the law courts), all named as Spiritualist believers in Ferry Over Jordan.

  The other Round Table regulars were Hellier (occultist), Vesey (poet), Lutyens (hypnotist), Otway (barrister), Ponting alias Binner (golf secretary), Fr. Pring (priest), Dennison (ex-trooper), Frith (egyptologist), Creighton (police superintendent), Connor (engineer), plus the sole female attendee, ‘Laurie’—the author herself.

  This format is heavily reminiscent of the party atmosphere found so often in Victorian Christmas Numbers, notably those edited by Charles Dickens in Household Words and All the Year Round, and still very popular in the 1920s with series like The New Decameron (six volumes, 1919–1929), whose contributors included William Fryer Harvey, Dorothy L. Sayers, L. P. Hartley, and D. H. Lawrence.