M.R. JAMES and REGGIE OLIVER

The Game of Bear

THOUGH ROUGHLY A CENTURY divides them, both Montague Rhodes James and Reggie Oliver were educated at Eton and were Newcastle Scholars at that institution. Thereafter, their careers diverged slightly. James went on to Cambridge and an academic career; Oliver went to Oxford and then into the theatre.

Both have published four acclaimed collections of “ghost stories”. James’ classic tales can be found in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others and A Warning to the Curious. For Oliver, recent publications include his novel Virtue in Danger, and a vast collected edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths, published by Centipede Press, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series.

About the posthumously published collaboration that follows, Oliver explains: “James left ‘The Game of Bear’ in manuscript unfinished at his death in 1936, stopping at the words: ‘No, she mayn’t.’ In completing this story, I have tried as far as possible to enter into James’ mind and style and provide the ending James himself might have produced had not death intervened.

“Permission to do this was kindly granted by James’ great nephew, Mr Nicholas Rhodes James, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while attending one of Robert Lloyd-Parry’s famous theatrical renditions of James’ work.”

TWO ELDERLY PERSONS sat reading and smoking in the library of a country house after tea on an afternoon in the Christmas holidays, and outside a number of the children of the house were playing about. They had turned out all the lights and were engaged in the dreadful game of “Bear” which entails stealthy creepings up and down staircases and along passages, and being leapt upon from doorways with loud and hideous cries. Such a cry and an answering scream of great poignancy were heard just outside the library door. One of the two readers – an uncle of the young things who were disporting themselves there - leapt from his chair and dashed the door open. “I will not have you doing that!” he shouted (and his voice was vibrant with real anger); “Do you hear? Stop it at once. I can’t stand it. You – you – why can’t you find something else? What? . . . Well, I don’t care, I can’t put up with it . . .Yes, very well, go and do it somewhere where I can’t hear it.” He subsided into a growl and came back to his chair but his friend saw that his nerves were really on edge, and ventured something sympathetic. “It’s all very well,” said the uncle, “but I cannot bear that jumping out and screaming. Stupid of me to fly out like that, but I couldn’t help it. It reminded me of all that business – you know.”

“Well,” said the friend after a short pause, “I’m really not sure that I do. Oh!” he added, in a more concerned tone, “unless you mean Purdue.”

“That’s it,” said the uncle.

There was another silence, and then the friend said, “Really, I’m not sorry that happened just now, for I never did hear the rights of the Purdue business. Will you tell me exactly what happened?”

“I don’t know,” said the uncle. “I really don’t know if I ought. But I think I will. Not just now, though. I’ll tell you what: if it’s fine tomorrow we’ll take a walk in the morning and tonight I’ll think over the whole affair and get it straight in my mind. I have often felt somebody besides me ought to know about it, and all his people are out of the way now.”

The next day was fine, and the two men walked out to a hill at no real distance, which was known as Windmill Hill. The mill that had topped it was gone but a bit of the brick foundation remained and afforded a seat from which a good stretch of pleasant wild country could be seen. Here then Mr A and Mr B sat down on the short, dry grass with their backs against the warm brick wall, and Mr A produced a little bundle of folded paper and a pocket-book which he held up before Mr B as an indication that he was prepared not only to tell the story to which he stood pledged, but to back it with documentary evidence.

“I brought you here,” he said, “partly because you can see Purdue’s place. There!” He pointed with his stick to a wooded slope, which might be three or four miles off. In the wood was a large clearing and in the clearing stood a mansion of yellow stone with a portico, upon which, as it chanced, the sun was shining very brilliantly, so that the house stood out brightly against the background of dark trees.

“Where shall I begin?” said Mr A.

“Why,” said Mr B, “I’ll tell you exactly how little I know, and then you can judge. You and Purdue, you remember, were senior to me at school and at Cambridge. He went down after his three years; you stayed up for part of a fourth, and then I began to see more of you. Before that, I was more with people of my own year, and, beyond a fair number of meetings with Purdue at breakfast and lunch and so on, I never saw much of him – not nearly as much as I should have liked, in fact. Then I remember your going to stay with him – there, I suppose” (pointing with his stick) – “in the Easter Vac, and – well, that was the last of it.”

“Just so,” said Mr A. “I didn’t come up again, and you and I practically didn’t meet till a year or two back, did we? Though you were a better correspondent than any of my other Cambridge friends. Very well, then, there it is. I was never inclined to write the story down in a letter, and the long and short of it is that you have never heard it: but you do know what sort of man Purdue was, and how fond I was of him.

“When I stayed with him over there, the place was his only home, and yet it wasn’t his. He was an orphan and practically adopted by his uncle and aunt who were quite old childless people. There had been another uncle who had married a village woman, and had one daughter. That couple were very odd squalid creatures, and died, I think from drink, but the daughter survived and went on living in a cottage in the next parish. She wasn’t left destitute by any means in the way of money but she lived all by herself, and I think always with a sense of injury upon her that she wasn’t noticed by the county families and such. The remaining uncle and aunt had been kind enough to her and at one time used to invite her over to their place, but she had a very difficult temper and was always on the look-out for slights and injuries, and at last they gave up the effort to be cordial, and saw no more of her. It wasn’t to be expected after that that they would pass on the property to her (it was entirely at their disposition, to do what they liked with it) and no more they did. When they died it went to Purdue, about a year before his own death, that was. “So there he was, settled, you would say, into a happy life. He’d been brought up in the country and knew all the neighbourhood, places and people, very well; and was interested in farming and forestry and prepared to make himself useful. That last visit I paid him was particularly delightful. He was on such excellent terms with everybody in the village, ‘Master Henry’ to all of them, and just as well liked by the neighbours in the larger houses. I think the only fly in the ointment was that woman Caroline Purdue. She took to attending our parish church and we used to find her in our pew every Sunday morning. She didn’t say much to Henry, but all the service time she sat and looked at him through her veil. A short stout red-faced woman she was, with black hair and snappy black eyes. She used to wait in the churchyard till we had gone out and then set off on her threemile walk home. She gave me the creeps, I couldn’t say why; I suppose there was a flavour of concentrated hostility about her. “Henry was anxious of something of the same kind. His lawyer told me after his death that he had tried through them to get her to accept a handsome addition to her income and the gift of a suitable house wherever she liked in some other part of the county. They said she was as impracticable a woman as they had ever come across: she just sat and smiled broadly at them and said she was quite comfortable where she was, and didn’t want to move out of reach of her cousin Henry. ‘But wouldn’t it be more lively and amusing for you to be in some place where there’s more to be seen – theatres, and that sort of thing?’ No, oh no, she had plenty of things to occupy herself with, and – again – she didn’t want to move out of reach of her cousin Henry.

“‘But, but – your cousin Henry, you know; he’s likely to be a busy man – travelling about a good deal, and occupied with his men friends; it isn’t probable that he’ll be able to see much of you.’ Oh, she was quite content to take her chance of that: they would often be meeting when he was riding about, and no doubt there would be times when he was alone at the Court, and she could look in on him. ‘Ah well, that’s just the point. Are you sure that Mr Purdue will welcome that?’ ‘Yes, to be sure, why not?’ ‘Well, we have reason to think that he doesn’t wish it.’ Oh indeed! and pray had he commissioned these gentlemen to tell his own cousin that he had cast her off? A nice thing for a relative to hear, that her own flesh and blood preferred not to have anything to do with her. What had she done, she should like to know, to be treated in that way?

“There was more to the same effect, and the storm rose quickly, culminating in a short burst of tears, and a rapid stumping out of the room. The gentlemen who had been conducting the interview were left looking at each other and feeling they had not done much to advance their client’s wishes. But at least Miss Purdue left off her attendance at our church and, we gathered, did not favour any other place of worship in its stead.

“She was not more popular with the rest of the community than with Henry.

“How is the rest of this to be told? I have here some papers which bear on it, but they are fragmentary, of course. When Henry Purdue was alone in that big house he did what at other times was rather foreign to his habits – confided his feelings to paper. Here are some entries.

“ ‘Letter from CP’ (Caroline Purdue, of course). ‘Infernal woman. May she come and see me and talk over this painful matter. No, she mayn’t.’

“That one is dated fifth December 1883, a year to the day before his death, as it happens. You can see he wrote on loose sheets of paper, sometimes putting in the date in full, sometimes merely the day of the week. I had the devil of a job arranging them in some sort of order, but I felt, as his sole executor, under an obligation to do so. There is a pocket diary for the year of his death that contains a few terse jottings. That helped me to establish a chronology of events. Here is the next relevant entry.’

‘18th December. Letter from Hardacre (Lawyers) today saying CP quite impossible, and actually suggesting I talk to her! Am I not paying them handsomely to do this for me? I have no intention of conversing with the woman on any subject and intend to keep her at arm’s length. A figure of speech, of course, for I wish her to be at considerably more than an arm’s length from me. I have instructed my gamekeeper that if she is seen on my land she is to be turned off. (Politely of course.)

‘Wednesday. Yesterday evening I was in the library. Until recently I have not been at leisure to study my uncle’s collection of books, which turns out to contain some unexpected treasures. I have spent several delicious evenings of late slowly examining them, but that is by the by.

‘It was four o’clock; evening was already drawing in, and the light was clear, cloudless and wintry. The windows of my library face West. From them one sees a lawn, then the wooded slopes which surround – I might almost say hem in – my property. There is a gap in the trees on the library side through which I can see the sun descend below the brow of the hill. On this evening I noticed that upon this slope a solitary figure was standing in silhouette against the pallid evening sky.

‘Instinct told me at once who it was before reason confirmed that the squat, black-bombazined and bonneted figure must be my cousin CP. She was, of course, too far off for me to be certain of it, but I was nonetheless convinced that she was watching me. After trying in vain for some minutes to ignore her presence I rang for Marston.

‘I indicated the figure on the skyline and told him to go and send her about her business. Marston seemed reluctant to comply with my instructions and I am afraid I spoke to him rather sharply. He obeyed, but by the time he was walking across the lawn towards her, CP had turned tail and disappeared over the brow of the hill.’

“The very first note in Henry’s pocket diary for 1884 are the words ‘CP again’ against the date of the 3rd January. By this time, evidently, his cousin’s visitations had become a regular irritant. Then comes this paper which is headed ‘20th January’.

‘My guests had left not half an hour since, when there comes a banging on my front door. I peep out of the little window that looks onto the porch and there is CP, looking more than ever like Mrs Gamp, complete with umbrella with which she is hammering on my door. I instruct Marston to go to see what she wants but on no account to let her in.

‘Marston returns to tell me – as I had expected – that my cousin wishes to see me. I instruct him to inform her that I am indisposed and cannot. He conveys the message but she continues to hammer. It comes on to rain heavily, so I send out Marston to drive her home in the dogcart, but she will have none of it. She puts up her gamp and stumps off home by herself through the wet. Impossible woman!

‘Friday. I hear from the Rector’s wife that CP has caught a chill from her adventure in the rain. Feeling some small responsibility for her condition I sent Mrs Burns [his housekeeper] round to CP’s cottage with a bowl of broth and some calves’ foot jelly. Needless to say the offering is indignantly refused. I now wash my hands of her completely.

‘25th January. The chill, no doubt exacerbated by CP’s stubborn refusal of any assistance from myself and others, has finally done for her. A pulmonary infection had set in and the Rector found her dead in her bed when he paid a call on her this morning. Naturally I will see to all the proper funerary arrangements. God forgive me if I feel more than a little relieved that this dreadful incubus has now departed for good.’

‘In Purdue’s diary against the date 4th February are the words ‘CP Funeral, St Jude’s’. These words have been underlined three times in black ink. We now return again to the papers.

‘3rd March. Most unexpectedly and very much to my annoyance Hardacre informs me that my wretched cousin, CP has left me something in her will. It is only a parcel of books, but still, it is a nuisance. Perhaps she had heard tell of my bookish tastes, for I made no secret of them. Doubtless they are all so much valueless trash and barely worth sending to the church jumble sale.

‘Friday. The parcel of books that CP left me has arrived and, as I expected, there is little of value or interest. There are some religious tracts, a large old family Bible, which I suppose I must keep, and several volumes of eighteenth-century sermons of the dullest possible kind. Not even a Sherlock, let alone a Sterne, among them!

‘There is perhaps one item of interest. It is a small volume, quarter octavo, entitled: The Child’s Keepsake. Improving Rhymes Composed Expressly for Young Persons by A Lady. There is no date, but from the style of printing and the crude woodcuts which adorn the text I would guess it to be very late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century, and I have no doubt that the ‘Lady’ in question was some member of an Evangelical sect, an Enthusiast at any rate, perhaps one of Hannah More’s circle. My bibliophilic tastes do not extend to early literature for children, but I can recognize a rarity when I see one. The condition is excellent too, with the original boards, bound no doubt by a provincial bookseller, but a competent one.

‘The text is addressed to the young and consists of tales told in verse of an improving and moral character. At the head of each poem is a rectangular woodcut depicting an incident from the story. Here is a fair example. Its title is, ‘‘Reverence For the Aged Advised’’, and it begins:

‘It then goes on to tell the biblical story from Kings [II Kings ii, verses 23-24] about the children who derided Elisha for his baldness. He put a curse on his tormentors whereupon two she-bears came out of the wood to destroy them. The cut which accompanies this rhyme depicts the offending children being torn to pieces in a most savage manner. One of the she-bears has a small child’s head clamped between its merciless jaws.

‘I was not very favourably struck. That biblical tale has always exemplified for me the savagery – dare I say it, the inhumanity? – of the Old Testament, and it seems to me a cruel legend to tell to a child. Perhaps I am something of a sentimentalist in these matters, not having any children of my own.

‘Most of the verses are of the same punitive character, dwelling more on sin and retribution than virtue and reward. One in particular impresses me with its horrid severity. It is entitled: ‘‘The Dreadful Fate of Young Master Henry Who Stole an Apple From An Old Woman’’.’ (My name happens to be Henry!) In it a young boy steals an apple from a poor old woman and runs away home. Once there he secretes himself in a cupboard under the stairs in order to devour the purloined fruit in peace. He hears his mother calling for him but does not dare come out until he has finished eating. When he does, he encounters a woman whom he takes to be his mother, but she has a veil over her face.

‘I cannot say much for the Lady’s versifying abilities, but I must reluctantly admit that that I found the tale rather hard to put out of my mind. Added to which, the accompanying woodcut is quite dreadful. If I were not so absurdly reverential of all books I would have torn it out on the spot lest some young friend of mine accidentally encountered it. It depicts, crudely of course, but with considerable vividness, a dark corridor with a staircase going up on the right hand side. You can just see the door of the cupboard under the stairs lying open and a slice of blackness within.

‘In the corridor stands a strikingly disagreeable female figure. She is thin and wears the high-waisted gown of a woman of Jane Austen’s period. The head is covered by what appears to be a dark muslin veil through which the engraver’s cunning has allowed the more horrible features of her face to be seen. There is a hollow-eyed skull with just a few rags of skin clinging to the cheeks, and a gaping mouth full of horridly sharp teeth. Although common sense dictates that the eye-sockets must be empty the viewer forms the distinct impression that he is being watched by the ghastly figure on the page.

‘After that, I must say I leafed through the book rather rapidly, but encountered nothing so terrible. However there is something of interest at the very end of the book.

‘On the flyleaf, after the last printed page, another verse has been copied out by hand in a fair but childish copperplate. (Could it have been CP’s handwriting? Possibly, but the orthography looks older, around 1800, perhaps contemporaneous with the book’s publication.) It has no title and is in the same moralizing vein as the printed verses; yet it is different, more enigmatic. I note it down simply as a curiosity because it may represent quite an early reference to a particular children’s game, now popular. It runs as follows.

‘Having now sorted through my Uncle’s books I have extracted a good few which, though of some antiquarian value, are of no interest to me. I intend to send them up to London to be sold or exchanged for more congenial volumes. I shall add The Child’s Keepsake to this pile. Or perhaps family pietas will forbid me.

‘10th April. Lovely spring day. Rode over to Aylsham to see M. In the evening after dinner I was just crossing the hall to go to the library and was by the main staircase when I heard a voice, so close to me it was almost in my ear. It said:

‘The voice was elderly, but whose it was, or even whether it was male or female, I could not tell. It had a breathy sort of tone, sotto voce, as the Italians say. There was no one in the hall. I rang for Marston and he came eventually, but I am sure it was not him. The verse reminded me of that book The Child’s Keepsake which my cousin left me and which I still have somewhere, but I could not find the thing when I searched for it just now in the library.

‘The voice must have been some kind of auditory hallucination. I think I should get away from this place and travel for a while. If it were not for the progress I am making with M, I would go at once.’

“Incidentally,” said Mr A, “M was a Miss Mary Mills, daughter of a local landowner over at Aylsham. I will spare you the various eulogies he composes about her in these papers. Suffice it to say that it was a thoroughly suitable match for a young man of Henry Purdue’s station in life. Well, over the months of April and May there are a number of random jottings concerning the house: he mentions rats, odd whisperings and other inexplicable sounds such as those of heavy footsteps where none should have been, various minor domestic mishaps, that kind of thing. They all seem to weigh on him rather more than perhaps they should have done, and several times he writes ‘I must get away’ with the word ‘must’ underscored. Then under the heading ‘5th June’ comes the following:

‘When I went for my walk in the grounds after dinner it was rather close and oppressive. Must create more avenues in the trees that surround me. A curious thing: usually at this time of day the park is full of bird song and a nightingale often starts up in a nearby brake, but this evening there was not a sound to be heard. The air was thick and silent as if stuffed with cotton wool. I went indoors and just as I was about to mount the stairs in the hall I heard that voice again. It said:

‘What the deuce does it mean? I think the words come from that book I can’t find. I must get away.’

“Well,” said Mr A, “in July he did get away. The diary records his journeyings through France and Italy with nothing more enterprising than the name of a place written against a date. By September he was back in England and in October I met him in London. It was, as it happens, the last time I was to see my friend Henry Purdue. By this time Miss Mills had consented to be his bride and he seemed excessively pleased with life. It may be hindsight, but I do think that I detected a touch of feverishness in his high spirits. He was unusually excitable. I remember how he started violently in the smoking room of my club when an old member on a nearby sofa suddenly began to snore. He begged me to come to stay with him in the country which I agreed to do, but somehow, and to my everlasting regret, I never got round to it.

“What happened next I have from various witnesses, including his old butler Marston who was dreadfully cut up about it all.

“As winter approached Purdue went in for a round of gaiety and socializing. Doubtless his approaching nuptials – it was to be a spring wedding – added to his circle of friends and the goodwill everyone felt towards him. He opened up his own house to parties and festivities of various kinds, and it was at one of these that the tragedy occurred.

“It was early in December and Purdue had a house full of guests, several of them being husbands and wives with children. As it was late in the year it got dark several hours before it was time to put the young people to bed and so indoor games were proposed. Among those suggested was the Game of Bear. Marston told me that Purdue had at first objected strenuously to the idea, until he was overborne by the importunings of adults and children alike.

“The Game of Bear, as you know is like a conventional game of hide-and-seek except that if the hider can spring out and surprise the finder, he then ‘captures’ the finder and can draw the victim into the hiding place with him. Thus the game becomes a kind of battle between the hiders and the finders, but generally it descends into good-humoured chaos long before any clear result is discernible.

“Well, on this occasion the game was unusually prolonged and boisterous, especially as Purdue’s house, as you may guess, being a rambling structure, was well stocked with places of concealment. When the game was over and the children had been dispatched exhausted to their beds it was suddenly realized that the host was still missing. What could have happened to him? Had he perhaps hidden himself too well and then fallen asleep in his fastness? A search of the house was instituted in which all the adult guests and the servants took part.

“It was Marston who eventually found him in a cupboard under the stairs. Henry Purdue was huddled into a corner with his knees up to his chin, ‘like a whipped child’ as Marston put it. Of course poor Purdue was dead but the surprise was that he was cold and stiff. Fortunately, there were no children present but two of the ladies fainted when they caught a glimpse of him. The corpse had a dreadful look of fear on its face, and the eyes were open, fixed and staring. Marston also told me – although I rather I wish he hadn’t – that in his death throes my friend had bitten his thumb clean through to the bone.”

“Did you find that book among poor Purdue’s things?” said Mr B who was by way of being a bibliophile. “The Child’s Keepsake, wasn’t it? I should rather like to see it.”

“ I shouldn’t, and I’m very glad to say I found no such thing,” said Mr A severely.