COUNT MAGNUS
by M.R.James
By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story
came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn
from these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts
from them a statement of the form in which I possess them.
They consist, then, partly of
a series of collections for a book of travels, such a volume as
was a common product of the forties and fifties. Horace Marryat's
Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the Danish Isles is a fair
specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually
treated of some unfamiliar district on the Continent. They were
illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we
now expect to find in any well-regulated guidebook, and they
dealt largely in reported conversations with intelligent
foreigners, racy innkeepers and garrulous peasants. In a word,
they were chatty.
Begun with the idea of
furnishing material for such a book, my papers as they progressed
assumed the character of a record of one single personal
experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve,
almost, of its termination.
The writer was
a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I
have to depend entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and
from these I deduce that he was a man past middle age, possessed
of some private means, and very much alone in the world. He had,
it seems, no settled abode in England, but was a denizen of
hotels and boarding-houses. It is probable that he entertained
the idea of settling down at some future time which never came;
and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the
early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have
thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to
property of his that was warehoused at that establishment.
It is
further apparent that Mr Wraxall had
published a book, and that it treated of a holiday he had once
taken in Brittany. More than this I cannot say about his work,
because a diligent search in bibliographical works has convinced
me that it must have appeared either anonymously or under a
pseudonym.
As to his character, it is
not difficult to form some superficial opinion. He must have been
an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems that he was near
being a Fellow of his college at Oxford--Brasenose, as I judge
from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that of
over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller,
certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in
the end.
On what proved to be his last
expedition, he was plotting another book. Scandinavia, a region
not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago, had struck him as
an interesting field. He must have lighted on some old books of
Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him that
there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great
Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore,
to some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the
early summer of 1863.
Of his travels in the North
there is no need to speak, nor of his residence of some weeks in
Stockholm. I need only mention that some savant resident there
put him on the track of an important collection of family papers
belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house in
Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.
The manor-house, or
herrgård, in question is to be called Råbäck (pronounced
something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is one
of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the
picture of it in Dahlenberg's Suecia antiqua et moderna, engraved
in 1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It
was built soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much
like an English house of that period in respect of
material--red-brick with stone facings--and style. The man who
built it was a scion of the great house of De la Gardie, and his
descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is the name by which I
will designate them when mention of them becomes necessary.
They received Mr Wraxall with
great kindness and courtesy, and pressed him to stay in the house
as long as his researches lasted. But, preferring to be
independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing in Swedish,
he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out quite
sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months.
This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the
manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a park, and was protected--we should say grown
up--with large old timber. Near it you found the walled garden,
and then entered a close wood fringing one of the small lakes
with which the whole country is pitted. Then came the wall of the
demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll--a knob of rock lightly
covered with soil--and on the top of this stood the church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious
building to English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and
filled with pews and galleries. In the western gallery stood the
handsome old organ, gaily painted, and with silver pipes. The
ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by a seventeenth-century
artist with a strange and hideous 'Last Judgement', full of lurid
flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and brown
and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung from the roof;
the pulpit was like a doll's-house, covered with little painted
wooden cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was
hinged to the preacher's desk. Such sights as these may be seen
in many a church in Sweden now, but what distinguished this one
was an addition to the original building. At the eastern end of
the north aisle the builder of the manor-house had erected a
mausoleum for himself and his family. It was a largish
eight-sided building, lighted by a series of oval windows, and it
had a domed roof, topped by a kind of pumpkin-shaped object
rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish architects greatly
delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and was painted
black, while the walls, in common with those of the church, were
staringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the
church. It had a portal and steps of its own on the northern
side.
Past the churchyard the path
to the village goes, and not more than three or four minutes
bring you to the inn door.
On the first day of his stay
at Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door open, and made those
notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into the
mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by
looking through the keyhole just descry that there were fine
marble effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of
armorial ornament, which made him very anxious to spend some time
in investigation.
The papers he had come to
examine at the manor-house proved to be of just the kind he
wanted for his book. There were family correspondence, journals,
and account-books of the ear]iest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and
picturesque detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a
strong and capable man. Shortly after the building of the mansion
there had been a period of distress in the district, and the
peasants had risen and attacked several chateaux and done some
damage. The owner of Råbäck took a leading part in suppressing
the trouble, and there was reference to executions of ringleaders
and severe punishments inflicted with no sparing hand.
The portrait of this Magnus
de la Gardie was one of the best in the house, and Mr Wraxall
studied it with no little interest after his day's work. He gives
no detailed description of it, but I gather that the face
impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or goodness;
in fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost phenomenally
ugly man.
On this day Mr Wraxall took
his supper with the family, and walked back in the late but still
bright evening.
'I must remember,' he writes,
'to ask the sexton if he can let me into the mausoleum at the
church. He evidently has access to it himself, for I saw him
tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door.'
I find that early on the
following day Mr Wraxall had some conversation with his landlord.
His setting it down at such length as he does surprised me at
first; but I soon realized that the papers I was reading were, at
least in their beginning, the materials for the book he was
meditating, and that it was to have been one of those
quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of
an admixture of conversational matter.
His object, he says, was to
find out whether any traditions of Count Magnus de la Gardie
lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman's activity, and
whether the popular estimate of hirn were favourable or not. He
found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his
tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to
him as Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or
flogged and branded in the manor-house yard. One or two cases
there were of men who had occupied lands which encroached on the
lord's domain, and whose houses had been mysteriously burnt on a
winter's night, with the whole family inside. But what seemed to
dwell on the innkeeper's mind most--for he returned to the
subject more than once--was that the Count had been on the Black
Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.
You will naturally inquire,
as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimage may have been. But
your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfied for the time
being, just as his did. The landlord was evidently unwilling to
give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the point, and,
being called out for a moment, trotted off with obvious alacrity,
only putting his head in at the door a few minutes after wards to
say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be back till
evening.
So Mr Wraxall had to go
unsatisfied to his day's work at the manor-house. The papers on
which he was just then engaged soon put his thoughts into another
channel, for he had to occupy himself with glancing over the
correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm and her
married cousin Ulrica Leonora at Råbäck in the years 1705-10.
The letters were of exceptional interest from the light they
threw upon the culture of that period in Sweden, as anyone can
testify who has read the full edition of them in the publications
of the Swedish Historical Manuscripts Commission.
In the afternoon he had done
with these, and after returning the boxes in which they were kept
to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, very naturally, to
take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order to
determine which of them had best be his principal subject of
investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied
mostly by a collection of account-books in the writing of the
first Count Magnus. But one among them was not an account-book,
but a book of alchemical and other tracts in another
sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar with alchemical
literature, Mr Wraxall spends much space which he might have
spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various
treatises: The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words,
book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so
forth; and then he announces with a good deal of circumstance his
delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank near the
middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself headed
'Liber nigrae peregrinationis'. It is true that only a few lines
were written, but there was quite enough to show that the
landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least as
old as the time of Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This
is the English of what was written:
'If any man desires to obtain
a long life, if he would obtain a faithful messenger and see the
blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he should first go
into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the prince. . .' Here
there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly done, so
that Mr Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it
as aëris ('of the air'). But there was no more of the text
copied, only a line in Latin: 'Quaere reliqua hujus materiei
inter secretiora' (See the rest of this matter among the more
private things).
It could not be denied that
this threw a rather lurid light upon the tastes and beliefs of
the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him by nearly three
centuries, the thought that he might have added to his general
forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only
made him a more picturesque figure; and when, after a rather
prolonged contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall
set out on his homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of
Count Magnus. He had no eyes for his surroundings, no perception
of the evening scents of the woods or the evening light on the
lake; and when all of a sudden he pulled up short, he was
astonished to find himself already at the gate of the churchyard,
and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes fell on the
mausoleum.
'Ah,' he said, 'Count Magnus,
there you are. I should dearly like to see you.'
'Like many solitary men,' he
writes, 'I have a habit of talking to myself aloud; and, unlike
some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect an answer.
Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case, there was
neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I
suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object
on the floor, whose clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think,
sleeps sound enough.'
That same evening the
landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall say that he wished
to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in Sweden) of
the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn parlour. A
visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for the
next day, and a little general conversation ensued.
Mr Wraxall, remembering that
one function of Scandinavian deacons is to teach candidates for
Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own memory on a
Biblical point.
'Can you tell me,' he said,
'anything about Chorazin?'
The deacon seemed startled,
but readily reminded him how that village had once been
denounced.
'To be sure,' said Mr
Wraxall; 'it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?'
'So I expect,' replied the
deacon. 'I have heard some of our old priests say that Antichrist
is to be born there; and there are tales--'
'Ah! what tales are those?'
Mr Wraxall put in.
'Tales, I was going to say,
which I have forgotten,' said the deacon; and soon after that he
said good night.
The landlord was now alone,
and at Mr Wraxall's mercy; and that inquirer was not inclined to
spare him.
'Herr Nielsen,' he said, 'I
have found out something about the Black Pilgrimage. You may as
well tell me what you know. What did the Count bring back with
him?'
Swedes are habitually slow,
perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the landlord was an exception.
I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that the landlord spent at
least one minute in looking at him before he said anything at
all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good deal of
effort he spoke:
'Mr Wraxall, I can tell you
this one little tale, and no more--not any more. You must not ask
anything when I have done. In my grandfather's time--that is,
ninety-two years ago--there were two men who said: "The
Count is dead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and
have a free hunt in his wood"--the long wood on the hill
that you have seen behind Råbäck. Well, those that heard them
say this, they said: "No, do not go; we are sure you
will meet with persons walking who should not be walking. They
should be resting, not walking." These men laughed. There
were no forest-men to keep the wood, because no one wished to
hunt there. The family were not here at the house. These men
could do what they wished.
'Very well, they go to the
wood that night. My grandfather was sitting here in this room. It
was the summer, and a light night. With the window open, he could
see out to the wood, and hear.
'So he sat there, and two or
three men with him, and they listened. At first they hear nothing
at all; then they hear someone--you know how far away it is--they
hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of his soul
was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of
each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then
they hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They
hear him laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that
laughed, and, indeed, they have all of them said that it was not
any man at all. After that they hear a great door shut.
'Then, when it was just light
with the sun, they all went to the priest. They said to him:
'"Father, put on your
gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men, Anders Bjornsen
and Hans Thorbjorn."
'You understand that they
were sure these men were dead. So they went to the wood--my
grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like so many
dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. He
said when they came to him:
'"I heard one cry in the
night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I cannot forget that,
I shall not be able to sleep again."
'So they went to the wood,
and they found these men on the edge of the wood. Hans Thorbjorn
was standing with his back against a tree, and all the time he
was pushing with his hands--pushing something away from him which
was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and
took him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the
winter; but he went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders
Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tell you this about
Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but now his
face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off
the bones. You understand that? My grandfather did not forget
that. And they laid him on the bier which they brought, and they
put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked before; and they
began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they could. So,
as they were singing the end of the first verse, one fell down,
who was carrying the head of the bier, and the others looked
back, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of
Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to
close over them. And this they could not bear. Therefore the
priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they
buried him in that place.'
The next day Mr Wraxall
records that the deacon called for him soon after his breakfast,
and took him to the church and mausoleum. He noticed that the key
of the latter was hung on a nail just by the pulpit, and it
occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be left
unlocked as a rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a
second and more private visit to the monuments if there proved to
be more of interest among them than could be digested at first.
The building, when he entered it, he found not unimposing. The
monuments, mostly large erections of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, were dignified if luxuriant, and the
epitaphs and heraldry were copious. The central space of the
domed room was occupied by three copper sarcophagi, covered with
finely-engraved ornament. Two of them had, as is commonly the
case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifix on the lid.
The third, that of Count Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead of
that, a full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round the edge
were several bands of similar ornament representing various
scenes. One was a battle, with cannon belching out smoke, and
walled towns, and troops of pikemen. Another showed an execution.
In a third, among trees, was a man running at full speed, with
flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed a strange
form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it
for a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude, or
whether it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In
view of the skill with which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr
Wraxall felt inclined to adopt the latter idea. The figure was
unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a hooded
garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which
projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm.
Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and
continues: 'On seeing this, I said to myself, "This, then,
which is evidently an allegorical representation of some kind--a
fiend pursuing a hunted soul--may be the origin of the story of
Count Magnus and his mysterious companion. Let us see how the
huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will be a demon blowing his
horn."' But, as it turned out, there was no such sensational
figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a hillock, who
stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an interest
which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.
Mr Wraxall noted the
finely-worked and massive steel padlocks--three in number--which
secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was detached, and
lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the deacon
longer or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward
to the manor-house.
'It is curious,' he notes,
'how on retracing a familiar path one's thoughts engross one to
the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects. Tonight, for the
second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I was going (I
had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the
epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness,
and found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate,
and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, "Are
you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?" and
then something more which I have failed to recollect. It seemed
to me that I must have been behaving in this nonsensical way for
sometime.'
He found the key of the
mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and copied the
greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the
light began to fail him.
'I must have been wrong,' he
writes, 'in saying that one of the padlocks of my Count's
sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that two are loose. I
picked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge,
after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is
still firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot
guess how it is opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am
almost afraid I should have taken the liberty of opening the
sarcophagus. It is strange, the interest I feel in the
personality of this, I fear, somewhat ferocious and grim old
noble.'
The day following was, as it
turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall's stay at Råbäck. He
received letters connected with certain investments which made it
desirable that he should return to England; his work among the
papers was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided,
therefore, to make his farewells, put some finishing touches to
his notes, and be off.
These finishing touches and
farewells, as it turned out, took more time than he had expected.
The hospitable family insisted on his staying to dine with
them--they dined at three--and it was verging on half-past six
before he was outside the iron gates of Råbäck. He dwelt on
every step of his walk by the lake, determined to saturate
himself, now that he trod it for the last time, in the sentiment
of the place and hour. And when he reached the summit of the
churchyard knoll, he lingered for many minutes, gazing at the
limitless prospect of woods near and distant, all dark beneath a
sky of liquid green. When at last he turned to go, the thought
struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as
well as the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but twenty
yards away, and he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It
was not long before he was standing over the great copper coffin,
and, as usual, talking to himself aloud. 'You may have been a bit
of a rascal in your time, Magnus,' he was saying, 'but for all
that I should like to see you, or, rather--'
'Just at that instant,' he
says, 'I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily enough I drew it back,
and something fell on the pavement with a clash. It was the
third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the
sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and--Heaven is my witness
that I am writing only the bare truth--before I had raised myself
there was a sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw
the lid shifting upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I
could not for my life stay for one moment. I was outside that
dreadful building in less time than I can write--almost as
quickly as I could have said--the words; and what frightens me
yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I sit here in
my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty
minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and
I cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was
something more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether
it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this
that I have done?'
Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day, as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man. One of several small notebooks that have come to me with his papers gives, not a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journey was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of this kind:
24. Pastor
of village in Skane. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
25. Commercial traveller from
Stockholm going to Trollhättan. Black cloak, brown hat.
26. Man in long black
cloak, broad-leafed hat, very
old-fashioned.
This entry
is lined out, and a note added: 'Perhaps identical with No. 13.
Have not yet seen his face.' On referring to No. 13, I find that
he is a Roman priest in a cassock.
The net result of the
reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people appear in the
enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak and
broad hat, and the other a 'short figure in dark cloak and hood'.
On the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six
passengers appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is
perhaps absent, and the short figure is certainly absent.
On reaching England, it
appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, and that he resolved
at once to put himself out of the reach of some person or persons
whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to regard
as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle--it was a closed
fly--not trusting the railway, and drove across country to the
village of Belchamp St Paul. It was about nine o'clock on a
moonlight August night when he neared the place. He was sitting
forward, and looking out of the window at the fields and
thickets--there was little else to be seen--racing past him.
Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner two figures were
standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the taller one
wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their
faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet
the horse shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr Wraxall
sank back into his seat in something like desperation. He had
seen them before.
Arrived at Belchamp St Paul,
he was fortunate enough to find a decent furnished lodging, and
for the next twenty-four hours he lived, comparatively speaking,
in peace. His last notes were written on this day. They are too
disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full, but the
substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from
his pursuers--how or when he knows not--and his constant cry is
'What has he done?' and 'Is there no hope?' Doctors, he knows,
would call him mad, policemen would laugh at him. The parson is
away. What can he do but lock his door and cry to God?
People still remembered last
year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange gentleman came one evening
in August years back; and how the next morning but one he was
found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury that viewed
the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't
speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God;
and how the people as kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week,
and went away from that part. But they do not, I think, know that
any glimmer of light has ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on
the mystery. It so happened that last year the little house came
into my hands as part of a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863,
and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so I had it pulled
down, and the papers of which I have given you an abstract were
found in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best
bedroom.
The End
Lovecrft. El Horror Según Lovecraft . Madrid : Ediciones Siruela. 1988.vol. 2.pp. 105-127.
www.mtroyal.ab.ca/programs/arts/english/gaslight