THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

  THE TERRACES

  OF NIGHT

  Being Further Chronicles

  of the

  ‘Club of the Round Table’

  Margery Lawrence

  ‘He who goes walking on the terraces of night has only

  Himself to blame if he meets with strange things.’

  Chinese Proverb

  Ash-Tree Press

  THE TERRACES OF NIGHT

  ISBN: 9781553102984 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553102991 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  for Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2013

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 1999

  First published 1932

  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

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Richard Dalby

  January

  The Crystal Snuff-Box

  February

  Mare Amore

  March

  Tinpot Landing

  April

  The Portrait of Comtesse X

  May

  Nannory House

  June

  The Room at the Rosenhaus

  July

  The Ikon

  August

  The Dream

  September

  The Dogs of Pemba

  October

  The Strange Case of Miss Cox

  November

  The Death Strap

  December

  The Shrine at the Cross-roads

  Sources

  THE TERRACES

  OF NIGHT

  TO

  LILIKA

  With whom I heard the ‘Pipes of Pan’

  Foreword

  Some time ago I wrote a book called Nights of the Round Table, which contained a group of stories heard by me at the monthly meetings in a friend’s flat, where each and all who came had, sooner or later, to pay the tribute of a good story. But of no ordinary story! Round the Round Table at Frank Saunderson’s only stories of Strange Things were permitted, and the stranger the better. . . . Herewith, then, a further collection of stories heard at the ‘Club of the Round Table’, with my thanks to the friends who told them, and my hopes that they have lost nothing in my re-telling.

  THE AUTHOR

  Introduction

  MARGERY LAWRENCE (1889–1969) was a lifelong believer in the supernatural and reincarnation. She clearly remembered her previous lifetimes in Egypt, Greece, Persia, China, and India, the last two being among her very oldest ‘memories’.

  ‘I know I have lived in Italy during the Renaissance period and in France more than once—the last time during the period of the Revolution,’ she declared. ‘And I have certainly been incarnated in Scandinavia; Norway in particular is uncannily familiar to me, and also the Hebrides, which so many Norsemen knew.’ These memories inspired many of her most popular novels, including The Bridge of Wonder, The Rent in the Veil, Emma of Alkistan, and The Gate of Yesterday, together with various recurring themes in her many ghost stories.

  Her first mystical experience of reincarnation happened in her early adolescent years, when her psychic powers were developing strongly, during a visit with friends in a remote part of the Welsh border. On a drive to an old Roman camp, she was able to predict all the approaching landmarks before seeing them. On reaching and ascending the Roman mound, her friends saw her physically assaulted and thrown to the ground by an invisible force, and she was immediately found to have five long red weals on her back, as though these had been inflicted by a violent (but completely unseen) whip. Nearly half a century later she described the experiences of a woman who found she was living in both Roman and modern Britain in The Rent in the Veil (1951).

  Close encounters with the ‘other side’ came regularly to Margery Lawrence for the rest of her life: ‘Side by side with us exist literally millions of beings, elusive, intangible, only rarely visible to us: an immense variety of entities great and small, all with their own place in the Cosmic Plan.’ This always remained her firm belief.

  Several of the ghosts she witnessed personally were nature-spirits like the ‘Green Boy’ she saw one moonlight night in an old garden near Stratford-on-Avon, sitting astride her balcony—‘a creature about four feet high, slim and active, like a lad of about fifteen years old, with a queer little narrow face and bright eyes and upstanding curly hair like green flames’—quite similar to some of the creatures of ancient folklore she had drawn for Fiona Macleod’s The Hills of Ruel in 1921. These nature-spirits inspired several of her earliest occult tales, such as ‘Robin’s Rath’ and ‘How Pan Came to Little Ingleton’.

  During 1926, the year that her first great ghost story collection, Nights of the Round Table, was published, Margery became engaged to Arthur Edward Towle, well known as a member of the ‘Towle Hotel Empire’ dynasty, being resident manager and Controller of the regally gothic Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras in London.

  His father, Sir William Towle (1849–1929), had always been deeply interested in increasing all travelling amenities in hotels and on railways—in order to ensure that all travel and catering should be as luxurious and pleasurable as possible throughout Britain—and was manager of Midland Railway Hotels for nearly half a century from 1871. He designed and superintended the construction of the Midland Hotel in Manchester, and also the Midland Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. He and his eldest son, Lt.-Col. Francis Towle (1876–1951), were knighted in 1920 and 1919 respectively. Both Francis and his younger brother Arthur (1878–1948) were educated at Marlborough before entering their father’s hotel business. Arthur received a CBE in 1919 while acting as Controller of Hotels for the Peace Conference in Paris, and reigned as Controller of the LMS Hotel Services for nearly twenty years from 1925 to 1944.

  He married Margery Lawrence at the Register Office of St Pancras on 16 September 1927, settling into a large luxurious flat at 25 Princess Court, Bryanston Place, London W1. (Margery had previously lived in her small artist’s studio at 4 Gordon Square, Kensington, London W8.) They enjoyed a very happy marriage, without children, for twenty-one years.

  After four years of serious illness, Arthur Towle died on 26 August 1948, just four days after his seventieth birthday. During the subsequent few weeks, Margery continued to see the spirit of Arthur, lying on his favourite couch, tended by the shadowy figures of his dead mother and sister, and later joined by the unmistakably bulky shape of Loftus Allen (a very close friend who had ‘passed over to the other side’ three years earlier).

  By late September, Arthur’s spirit had risen and walked, looking much younger and ruddy with good health; and his joyful widow Margery continued to see him—with the two women and Loftus—in her flat on several later occasions. She published an account of these experienc
es describing how ‘I saw my Husband awake from Death’ in the Psychic Journal, November 1948.

  Uncannily, when I originally discovered a first edition of The Terraces of Night in a secondhand bookshop more than twenty-five years ago, it was Loftus Allen’s own copy, affectionately inscribed to him on the flyleaf from Margery. Some time later, I found her volume on Spiritualism, Ferry Over Jordan (1944), in another bookshop. On opening the front cover, I saw inscribed on the flyleaf. ‘To Loftus, With love from Margery, Xmas 1944’. This was given to him very soon before he passed over to the ‘other side’, where he could personally confirm all the theories outlined by Margery in the book.

  * * * * *

  Margery Lawrence was Arthur Towle’s second wife (following his divorce from Mabel Ethel Taylor), but it was not generally realised that he was actually Margery’s second husband, especially as—according to their marriage certificate—her name and ‘condition’ were officially recorded as ‘Margery Lawrence, spinster’.

  There was a long-standing family legend that during the First World War she had gone to her beloved Italy, where she fell in love with—and married—the most handsome and heroic Air Ace in that country, virtually the Italian equivalent of Manfred von Richthofen. She never alluded to this romantic period of her life in Who’s Who, Ferry Over Jordan, or her volume of autobiographical poetry, Fourteen to Forty-Eight, but a few later (1940s) dustjacket blurbs did briefly state that ‘the war of 1914–18 took her abroad to France and Italy, where she made a secret and (she admits!) very foolish marriage with a well-known Italian flying ace who was killed shortly afterwards’.

  The only flying ace who fits this description is Italy’s top-scoring fighter pilot, Maggiore Francesco Baracca, who shot down thirty-four enemy Austrian aircraft between April 1916 and June 1918, when he himself was killed with a bullet through his forehead fired by the gunner of an Austrian two-seater attacking from above. There are at least three Italian biographies of Baracca which I have not yet seen, but these probably contain full details of his short life of thirty years and his ‘secret’ marriage.

  * * * * *

  The most successful and best known of Margery Lawrence’s novels published in the years immediately following Nights of the Round Table was based on a story related to her by a close Italian friend, Dr Riccardo Gianfilippi (of Rome and Siena), published in 1931 as The Madonna of Seven Moons.

  This stirring narrative of split personality and schizophrenia, with the genteel and sweet Maddalena Labardi and the wild tempestuous gypsy Rosanna, achieved immortal fame as the Gainsborough film Madonna of the Seven Moons [sic], which became the most financially successful British movie of 1944. Now regarded as a ‘so awful it’s wonderful’ camp classic, it is still greatly relished on innumerable television repeats. Starring Phyllis Calvert as Maddalena/Rosanna, ably supported by Stewart Granger, and with John Stuart and Patricia Roc (as her husband and daughter respectively), this version begins with an immediate (subtly suggested) rape scene, seeking to explain Maddalena’s eventual split personality. After the inevitable incarceration in a convent, she marries the Italian Gilbert Labardi in Florence in August 1919 (very near the date of Margery’s own secret marriage). The initial movie credits firmly declare: ‘This story is based on a real case—There was a Maddalena—Medical records verify her case.’ How many of Margery’s other weird tales were based on real events?

  * * * * *

  Margery’s busy writing career happily continued unabated after her marriage to Arthur Towle in 1927, and she was constantly in demand by the Tatler, Britannia, Nash’s, and other quality magazines. Her stories for the Nash’s group of magazines included ‘A Woman Who Needed Killing: a story of the Tropics’ (Nash’s, June 1927) and ‘The Portrait of Comtesse X’ (Pall Mall, July 1927); and among her controversial articles were ‘The Parasite’ (a tongue-in-cheek article on women in Nash’s, September 1927), ‘Youth-the over-rated’ (Nash’s, July 1928), and ‘Talking and Telling’ (on women keeping secrets, in Good Housekeeping, October 1932). Glamorous studio photographs of Margery Lawrence frequently accompanied her articles in the glossy pictorial magazines.

  Between 1926 and 1931 Margery Lawrence continued to write a large number of short stories, for quality monthlies, and the best of these were subdivided into her second and third collections. Snapdragon (1931) contained a dozen wide-ranging tales of romance, mystery, and crime, including ‘The Upas Tree’, which was filmed by Cecil B. de Mille in 1929 under the title A Dangerous Woman starring Olga Baclanova and Clive Brook.

  The Terraces of Night was published by Hurst & Blackett (part of the Hutchinson group) in February 1932 [undated]. The twelve stories, all well up to the high standard maintained in Nights of the Round Table, had originally appeared in several different popular magazines, including Britannia & Eve, Cassell’s Magazine of Fiction, The New London Magazine, Nash’s Pall Mall, and The Tatler. Unlike the stories in her earlier collection six years previously, Lawrence’s ‘further Chronicles of the “Club of the Round Table”’ are not embellished by any introductions, preambles, afterthoughts, or comments from Saunderson or other members who were hitherto given irregular mention by name. Apart from the dozen trades and professions (‘antiquarian’, ‘priest’, ‘poet’, ‘sailor’, etc.) given in the subtitles for each story, no further descriptions or names are supplied, thereby moving away from the ‘Victorian Christmas Number’ atmosphere to a more straightforward traditional short story collection.

  The Terraces of Night proved popular enough to go into a second impression in 1933, followed by a third in 1936. This was actually a new edition with completely new typesetting, and the overall length was slightly reduced from 287 to 256 pages. The typeface was further reset and encapsulated to only 160 pages in the cheap paperback Readers Library/Hurst & Blackett edition issued in May 1947 [undated] simultaneously with Nights of the Round Table, Snapdragon, and The Floating Café. These poorly produced ephemeral and very fragile paperbacks were obviously not designed to last much longer than a year or two. Although the paperback cover of The Terraces of Night implies that a total of 32,000 copies of this title were published between 1932 and 1947, very few copies of the paperback and three hardback editions seem to have survived. Possibly many were pulped?

  I’m very grateful to both David Rowlands and David Tibet for sending me copies of the paperback edition and hardback dustjacket picture, which depict Elizabeth Denning’s ghost (‘clad in a gown of yellow satin’) menacing Lady Isabel in ‘The Crystal Snuff-box’ and the malevolent ghostly abbess of ‘Nannory House’ respectively.

  * * * * *

  Probably due to the rarity of The Terraces of Night, and its general unavailability to modem anthologists (especially in America), only two of the stories have ever been reprinted: ‘The Dogs of Pemba’ (The Tatler, 26 November 1926) appeared in Hugh Lamb’s first anthology, A Tide of Terror (1972; now itself a very scarce volume), and ‘Mare Amore’ (originally titled ‘Storm’ in Cassell’s Magazine, December 1931) was included in my own Virago Book of Ghost Stories—The Twentieth Century, Vol. II (1991). Thus the remaining ten stories in this collection will be entirely unfamiliar and new to most readers today.

  Richard Dalby

  Scarborough

  March 1999

  January

  The Antiquarian’s Tale

  The Crystal Snuff-Box

  Peter Wilbrough, well-dressed, eight-and-twenty, and on his way to meet the girl of his heart, pretty Isabel Dillingham, stood craning his handsome head to see into the window at Andrew Crane’s antique shop, Bury Street, St James’.

  It was fortunate for Mr Crane that Mr Wilbrough’s luxurious flat was situated only a few doors away, so that the luckless Peter must needs pass temptation every day on his way to the usual haunts of the young man about town—and it must be admitted that Peter did not always avoid temptation with the strength of mind that he should, having a pretty taste in antiques, and an excellent income. But his recently announced engagement to the fai
r Isabel, and the expenses consequent thereupon, had rendered his visits to Mr Crane’s fewer and farther between than usual; therefore it was with a beaming smile that the proprietor of the ‘Sign of the Hourglass’ moved forward to greet him as he stepped down into the dark little shop.

  ‘The snuff-box in the window—certainly, Mr Wilbrough! You keeping well, sir? Haven’t seen you for a long time. There you are, sir—quaint little piece, and genuine. Oh yes, sir—you know me . . . genuine enough it is, you can bank on that!’

  It was certainly quaint—an oblong square box of clear white crystal bound and hinged with gilt metal; the lid was formed of two pieces of crystal laid face to face, enclosing a small piece of finely worked embroidery on faded yellow satin. A central posy of tiny flowers in shades of brown, surrounded with twirling, twisting letters in black—letters that spelt, in quaint old-world spelling, the phrase whose oddness and incongruity had attracted Peter’s attention in the window:

  ‘Beauty draws us by a single haire.’

  Mr Wilbrough turned the box about in his well-manicured hands—it was less pretty than quaint; original, charming. . . . At any rate, Isabel might like it for pins or something. He would take it. . . . Mr. Wilbrough being still in that fatuous state of adoration that impels the lover to fling daily offerings at the feet of the adored.

  ‘Right, Crane; pack it up and I’ll take it with me. Lady Isabel might like it—or else I’ll keep it myself. G’day.’

  But the purchasing of the Crystal Snuff-box, swiftly as it had been effected, had delayed the hastening lover ten minutes on his way to the Carlton and tea, and it may be that sheer annoyance caused pretty Isabel Dillingham to refuse, with a toss of her golden-fair head, the proffered gift. . . . It was a dull, ugly little thing, she avowed, and not in the least interesting. And even if it had been, there was no use in Peter’s thinking he could arrive late for an appointment with her and then ‘smarm’ things over with a present. . . . She hated waiting, and he knew she did! The young lady hunched and pouted all through tea, and refused to be amiable—at last, crushed and miserable, Peter took himself off, after dropping his inamorta at the parental door in Grosvenor Square, and retired disconsolate to his flat.