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Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. During President's Day Savings at the Home Depot, get up to 35% off select appliances. Plus save up to an extra $450 on select appliances like Whirlpool Shop, the Side by side fingerprint resistant stainless steel refrigerator with an indoor can caddy, or the fingerprint resistant stainless steel top control dishwasher with three 5 inch shelves. Make the most of President's Day savings and our lowest guaranteed at the Home Depot. How doers get more done? See homedepot.com Pricematch for details. See Store Online for details. Minimum purchase required. This episode is brought to you by Nerds Gummy Clusters the sweet treat that always elevates the vibe with a sweet gummy surrounded with tangy, crunchy nerds. Every bite of Nerds Gummy Clusters brings you a whole new world of flavor. Whether it's game night, on the way to a concert or kicking back with your crew, unleash your senses with Nerds. Gummy Clusters. Hello, today on the podcast, Part two of our look at the Jolly Corner by Henry James. That's coming up today on the History of Literature. Hello, hello, Hello. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for joining. Joining. Sorry. Joining me today, this might be a good time to go and listen to Part one of the Jolly Corner, our previous episode. If you haven't done that already. But if you'd rather just stick with us, or if it's been a while, don't worry, I will give you a summary of where we are in the story. There's a not me in all of us, isn't there? We reach a fork in the road, we go down one path instead of another, and then later in life, we wonder just who we'd have been had we stayed instead of gone, or gone instead of stayed. Henry James felt that way. He went to Europe for 33 years, came back to America, saw a thriving New York, and thought, what would I have been had I been here for 33 years, knowing no land other than America, my current state, he told a friend in his early 60s. This hybrid of America and Europe has been disastrous. Spencer Bryden, the protagonist in the Jolly Corner, certainly thinks that too. It's a curiosity that he can't quench. And it's all located somehow in the house of his childhood, the one on the Jolly Corner, as he's always called it, and which now stands empty except for the housekeeper's broom. For him, though, it's not empty. It's full of memories of his parents, his siblings, his younger self, the parties that he attended, the holidays he enjoyed. In this house, he creeps around at night with candles, indulging himself in memories which he can afford. He can afford to do it because of the money that he's making on another property that he's renovating. Meanwhile, his friend Ms. Staverton, whom he knew all those years ago, shares his taste for thinking about the road that he didn't take and the person he might have become. She's seen that person twice, in fact, in two dreams. What? What is he like? Spencer Bryden demands of his old friend Ms. Staverton, and she says, I'll tell you some other time. And as we will see, that leaves Spencer Bryden to go hunting for this alter ego himself. Colm Toibin, the critic and a former guest on our podcast, has written about James life in these years. He said, quote, James, like many of his contemporaries in London, was interested in doubles. His story, the Private Life, published in 1892, mirrored the world of Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll. In it, James dramatized his own life in society and company and his own vocation as a solitary man, a writer. In the story, he manages to place his writer in two places at exactly the same moment. He is both in company and alone at his desk now. In early August 1906, James wrote to his agent, I have an excellent little idea through not having slept a wink last night, all for thinking of it, and must therefore at least get the advantage of striking while the iron is hot. End quote. The story he was talking about, the excellent little idea that kept him up all night, is the story we are about to hear. We will hear today. The middle section, Part two, Chapter two. Let's see what it means to chase a double through 30 some years of separated history in an empty old house that belongs to Spencer Bryden, or maybe it belongs to his alter ego, or maybe to Henry James and his curiosity about the self that was within him that never got the chance to flower. And as we did before, I will pause and offer some commentary along the way. Chapter two. It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most most of a preposterous secret thrill in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was living for, since he really felt life to begin. But after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go. He sometimes came twice in the 24 hours. The moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight. This was the time of which, again and again he found himself hoping most then he could, as seemed to him most intimately, wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention never in his life before so fine on the pulse of the great vague place. He preferred the lampless hour, and only wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later, rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil, he watched with his glimmering light, moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far, rejoicing above all as much as he might in open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms, and by passages, the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice he found he could perfectly work without exciting remark. No one was in the least the wiser for it. Even Alice Staverton, who was, moreover, a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine. He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship. An accident so far favored him that if a fat avenue officer had happened on occasion to see him entering at 11:30, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at 2. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end. It was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel. And when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club. Everything was easy in Fenn, everything conspired and promoted. There was truly, even in the strain of his experience, something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified all the rest of consciousness, he circulated, talked, renewed loosely and pleasantly. Old relations met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations, and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career of such different contacts which he had spoken of to Ms. Staverton as ministering so little for those who might have watched it to edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success, and all with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of Their welcome, this popping of their corks. Just as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little of some game of Hombre Chinoise. He projected himself all day in thought, straight over the bristling line of hard, unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life. The life that as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great house door began for him on the jolly corner as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand. He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black and white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim, reverberating tinkle as of some far off bell hung, who should say where, in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing. He put his stick noiselessly away in a corner, feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal set, delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world. And the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible, pathetic wail to his strained ear of all the old baffled, forsworn possibilities. What he did, therefore, by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy. But they weren't really sinister. At least they weren't as he had hitherto felt them before they had taken the form he so yearned to make them take. The form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from story to story. Let's pause here, okay? What's going on? This is Spencer Bryden in his grand house on the jolly corner, searching for ghosts. And in particular, the ghost he thinks of as his own alter ego. He comes in by himself around 11:30 and stays until 2. And he walks around. He taps his walking stick on the marble floor, then silently puts his stick away in a corner. He feels that his own hushed presence can animate the spirits that are within. They were shy More shy than sinister, and he yearns to see them take form. He thinks they might take form. He has in mind what they'll look like when he does. Back to the story. That was the essence of his vision, which was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted. It was as clear as the figure on a check presented in demand for cash. His alter ego walked. That was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed slowly, warily, but all restlessly. He himself did. Mrs. Muldoon had been right absolutely with her figure, of their creeping. And the presence he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious and as shifty. The conviction of its probable, in fact, its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to night, laying on him finally a rigor to which nothing in his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially judging persons. He knew that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations. But he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle yet at bay, perhaps more formidable than any beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase, positively came again into play. There were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman stirred memories from his younger time of moor and mountain and desert, revived for him and to the increase of his keenness by the tremendous force of analogy he found himself at moments once he had placed his single light on some mantelshelf or in some recess, stepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree. He found himself holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone. Okay, let's pause there. A couple of things. James just lets all of this soak in, doesn't he? He doesn't really comment on this, the strangeness of it, because he's inside the mind of Spencer Bryden. This is written in close third person, but he trusts James, trusts the reader to take from this what the reader will. And the first thing to note is that this Is very odd behavior. This guy is in there by candlelight at very late hours, a completely empty house, roaming around. We have to. Creeping around, as his housekeeper, Mrs. Muldoon, would say. We have to address the possibility that Spencer Bryden is either half mad or will make himself half mad by these nighttime creeps. And also there's a sense that he could be scared out of his mind either because he might actually see one of these ghosts that he's so determined to see, or he'll see something else, a reflection, a. A figment of his imagination, something that will terrify him. The stakes in this story have been ratcheted up. This isn't a man idly thinking about his past and his. What might have beens. This is somebody putting himself in physical. I was going to say danger, but is danger really the right word? We don't know that. But he's putting himself through more than just idle thought experiments while drinking a cup of tea. This is someone doing some serious creeping around, putting his own mental state through a kind of physical endurance test. Okay, back to the story. He wasn't afraid, though, putting himself to question, as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tiger shoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it. And this indeed, since here at least he might be frank because of the impression so intimate and so strange that he himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel. They fell for him into categories. They fairly became familiar, the signs for his own perception of the alarm his presence and his vigilance created, Though leaving him always to remark portentously on his probably having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness unique in the experience of man. People enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become himself in the apparitional world an incalculable terror. He might have found this sublime had he quite dared to think of it. But he didn't too much insist truly on that side of his privilege. With habit and repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective. Putting down his dim luminary, he could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and only knowing it was there behind him in case of need, see his way about visually Project for his purpose. A comparative clearness. It made him feel this acquired faculty like some monstrous stealthy cat. He wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes. And what it mightn't verily be for the poor hard pressed alter ego to be confronted with such a type. Pause there. Oh my Mr. Henry James. Sometimes one needs to simply bow down before the master. Spencer Bryden not only thinks that he might be scared or we think that on his behalf. You're going to freak yourself out. You freak. But Briden starts to think that he is going to be terrifying the ghosts. He sets down his candle and walks from room to room in near darkness. He doesn't even need the candle. He's thinking I'm like a jungle cat, a predator, a monstrous stealthy cat. My eyes are probably yellow. And then he thinks my alter ego, this poor guy that I'm obsessed with that I'm chasing the me that that could have been. Well, that guy's going to be terrified when he sees me. This is quite a reversal. This has never been done with ghosts before. I bet that's Brydon. Now Bryden's imagining his way into the mind of his own alter ego. And looking out at Spencer Bryden, look at what kind of agency that he's reclaimed for himself. He's saying I'm not a weirdo looking for random ghosts in this house. Or I am. But won't those ghosts be impressed and alarmed and in awe of the job that I've done hunting them down and sniffing them out. How good I am. How I can just roam here through the dark even without my candle stalking them. They'll probably jump out of their socks. If ghosts wear socks, I guess jump out of. Jump out of the air where the socks should be. Be terrified by Spencer Bryden. That's the point. Shrink back in terror from the beast known as Spencer Bryden on the prowl. The creeper with the candle. Let's take a quick break and then come back to the story. Get the Angel Reese Special at McDonald's. Now let's break it down. My favorite barbecue sauce, American cheese, crispy bacon, pickles, onions and a sesame seed bun of course. And don't forget the fries and a drink. Sound good? I participate in restaurants for a limited time. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships. But it's just as important to focus on the green flags if you're not quite sure what they look like therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes. Visit betterhelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H E L P dot com this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match Limited by state law not available in all states we are back. Spencer Bryden is creeping through his house on the jolly corner, searching for ghosts from his past and doing such a good job that he thinks, won't they be terrified to see me? Me here in the dark, searching for my alter ego? Well, that poor fellow will have the bejesus scared out of him. Let's get back to Mr. Briden and hear how these nighttime prowls are going. What else does he do? Will he find what he's searching for? Or should I say, will what he's searching for find him? Back to the story he liked, however. The open shutters he opened everywhere, those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as carefully afterwards so that she shouldn't notice, he liked. Oh, this he did like, and above all in the upper rooms, the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the window panes, and scarcely less of the flare of the street lamps below the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This was human, actual, social, this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease, certainly for the countenance, coldly general and impersonal that all the while, and in spite of his detachment it seemed to give him. He had support, of course, mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side. It failed him considerably in central shades and the parts at the back, but if he sometimes on his rounds was glad of his optical reach. So none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The place there was more subdivided, a large extension in particular, where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in in the ramifications especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned many a time to look far down, not deterred from his gravity, even while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playing at hide and seek outside, in fact, he might himself make that ironic rapprochement. But within the walls, and in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against the cynical light of New York. It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him. Since he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly he could cultivate his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to cultivation, which indeed was but another name for his manner of spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection by practice, in consequence of which it had grown so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate that couldn't have broken upon him at once. This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition absolutely unmistakable and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights, of his being definitely followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken, and to the express end that he should the less confidently, less arrogantly appear to himself merely to pursue it, worried it finally quite broke him up. For it proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself as regards the essence of his position, sightless. And his only recourse then was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalized thought of these maneuvers recalled to him pantaloon at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous harlequin. But it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was re exposed to them. So that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences. And the result of the third was to confirm the after effect of the second. Okay, pause there. He leaves for three nights to test what he's learning, to see if it's real. He comes back. Yes, it's real. And the real thing is that something is following him. He can feel it. I can remember a horrible feeling of being in the basement of my parents house. My sister would turn off all the lights on Me down there, be in the dark. And I would need to walk back to the steps, to the staircase through all these darkened shadows. And I would feel like something was following me. I would turn around and the thing that was following me would crouch down and I would lose it in the dark. I couldn't see it any longer. And then I would turn and sprint for the staircase and run up the stairs as fast as I could. And then I would drift, dream about this. And in my dream, I would always turn around and always the thing would hide just as I turned around. But I knew it was there. And no matter how fast I ran or how long I managed to hold out before turning around or how quickly I turned around, I could never spot the thing. And yet it was there. It was always right behind me. What did it want from me? And because I knew it wasn't real, I knew it was my imagination. But that was almost just as frightening. Why did my imagination keep creating this? And why was it so vivid? Spencer Bryden is dealing with something like that now in that house. And imagine if I had taken my demon, my chaser, and instead of running away from it, what if I instead spent all of my time chasing it? If instead of fleeing and running up the stairs, I had hid in a corner, waiting for the thing to come out to see if this creature would come out and look around, maybe wonder where I had gone. Wouldn't the thing, if I waited long enough hiding, wouldn't the thing finally say, okay, enough concealment in the shadows, enough trying to scare this guy. In fact, it's become a little scary that he doesn't seem scared of me. Maybe I should hide from him. But then maybe even more curiosity would settle in on the part of this demon, and he would think, well, this guy is determined to really see me. And so maybe I need to be brave and stop hiding whenever he turns around. Maybe I need to face him directly. We'll see something similar for Spencer Bryden as he stalks this alter ego, the version of himself who stayed in New York instead of went to Europe, back to the story on his return that night, the night succeeding his last intermission, he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. He's there at the top and waiting, not as in general, falling back for disappearance. He's holding his ground and it's the first time, which is a proof, isn't it, that something has happened for him. So Briden argued with his hand on the banister and his foot on the lowest stair, in which position he felt as never before. The air chilled by his logic, he himself turned cold in it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. Harder pressed, yes, he takes it in with its thus making clear to him that I've come, as they say, to stay. He finally doesn't like and can't bear it in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest now balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has turned that up there is what has happened. He's the fanged or the antlered animal brought at last to bay. There came to him, as I say, but determined by an influence beyond my notation, the acuteness of this certainty, under which, however, the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it. For enterprise it marked nonetheless a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also represented, and with the self same throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute, almost the proudest duplication of consciousness. He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now worked up to anger. He'll fight. This intense impression made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause for the felt fact was so eager, since if it was his other self, he was running to earth. This ineffable identity was thus in the last resort, not unworthy of him. It bristled there somewhere near at hand, however unseen still as the hunted thought thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle. And bryden at this instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open, so that the drop of this danger was on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety, he was already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear, so rejoicing that he could in another form actively inspire that fear and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it. Pause there. This is what happens, dear listeners, when you take a little idea like, Huh, I wonder who I would have been if I'd stayed here. I think this all the time. I think that thought, what if I hadn't left Wisconsin? Would I have followed my father in his profession, maybe gotten married to some high school sweetheart, settled down somewhere not too far from where I grew up and never go to study at the University of Chicago, never live in Italy, never go to Taiwan or Tibet or Nepal or India, never meet my wife and have the kids that I have be a different version of myself? What would I be like? Would I be calmer, dumber, happier? Who would I be? How would that happen? And then I set those thoughts aside and get on with my day. And James says, well, let's make this physical, Jack. Instead of just thinking that, why don't I have you fly home searching for that different version of yourself and in such a setting and with so much determination that the other version of yourself notices he wants to meet you too. You're afraid of seeing him. Well, he's afraid of you, too. That version of yourself that stayed in Wisconsin is wondering to himself, huh? What if I'd gone to the University of Chicago for college instead of Madison like I almost did? What if I went to Chicago and then maybe went to Europe and Asia and maybe got married to some intelligent woman I met at college and we had kids together and we lived somewhere like Silicon Valley for a while, or moved around, living in a half a dozen different countries and the west coast and the east coast and starting. What if I started up a podcast called the History of Literature and raised a couple of kids near Washington, D.C. that guy wouldn't necessarily be eager to meet the version of Jack Wilson that you people know, dear listeners, he might be afraid of that guy. And Henry James, via Spencer Bryden, thinks, what if the two of them confront each other and fight? My goodness, dear listeners, I am prepared for anything in this story to happen at this point. Aren't you? And don't you want to know? Let's get back to the story. The apprehension of knowing it, the it, by the way, this is me in brackets. The it is fear. The apprehension of knowing it must, after a little, have grown in him. And the strangest moment of his adventure, perhaps the most memorable, or really most interesting afterwards of his crisis, was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious combat. The sense of a need to hold on to something even after the manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline, the vivid impulse, above all to move, to act, to charge somehow and upon something, to show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The state of holding on was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced. If there had been anything in the great vacancy to seize, he would presently have been aware of having clutched it, as he might, under a shock at home, have clutched the nearest chair back. He had been surprised, at any rate of this he was aware into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place. He had closed his eyes, held them tight for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened them, the room, the other contiguous rooms extraordinarily seemed lighter, so light almost, that at first he took the change for day he stood firm. However, that might be just where he had paused. His resistance had helped him. It was as if there were something he had tided over. He knew after a little what this was. It had been, in the imminent danger of flight, he had stiffened his will against going without this, he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that still, with his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how straight and swiftly to the bottom, well, as he had held out. Here he was still at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house still to run, when it should be his time to go, he would go at his time. Only at his time didn't he go. Every night very much at the same hour. He took out his watch. There was light for that. It was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon. He reached his lodgings for the most part at two, with his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would wait for the last quarter. He wouldn't stir till then, and he kept his watch there, with his eyes on it reflecting while he held it, that this deliberate wait, a weight with an effort which he recognized, would serve perfectly for the attestation he desired to make. It would prove his courage, unless indeed the latter might most be proved by his budging at last from his place. What he mainly felt now was that since he hadn't originally scuttled, he had his dignities which had never in his life seemed so many, all to preserve and to carry aloft. This was before him in truth, as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance. That remark indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light. Since what age of romance, after all, could have matched either the state of his mind or objectively, as they said, the wonder of his situation? The only difference would have been that brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll. He might then, that is, in the heroic time, have proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp. At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword, which utensil in the course of a minute he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of the door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well. But there was a fourth beyond them without issue save through the proceeding. To have moved, to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help, Though even in recognizing this, he lingered once more a little by the chimney piece on which his light had rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it not to his intimate conviction, been closed since his former visitation. The matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely it had been subsequently closed. That is, it had been on his previous passage, indubitably open. Quick pause. Spencer Bryden has been forcing himself to wait this very night. Wait longer than usual to prove his courage. He thinks this could change things. And then suddenly he sees in a series of rooms, three of which all open onto one another, and then the third one opens onto a fourth that has no other entry or exit, and he sees a door that he's sure was open, and now it's closed. Something is inside there and has closed the door. What will his courage think of this? Back to the story. He took it full in the face that something had happened between that he couldn't have noticed before, by which he meant, on his original tour of all the rooms that evening, that such a barrier had exceptionally presented itself. He had indeed, since that moment, undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view. And he tried to conv himself that he might perhaps then have gone into the room and inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never did. It was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware, quite on the brain, the strange apparition at the far end of one of them, of his baffled prey, which had become by so sharp an irony, so little the term now to apply, was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty he had known 50 times the start of perception that had afterwards dropped, had 50 times gasped to himself. There, under some fondness, brief hallucination, the house, as the case stood, admirably lent itself. He might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doors, the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual, almost complete proscription of them. But it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say, focused and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the elbow Quick pause at the end of that paragraph. He doesn't. He didn't close that door because he never closes the doors. He likes to look through them and see if he can catch something at the other end. And he sees a shadow, something far away, and then he realizes it wasn't the thing he was looking for. That's what he does. He doesn't close the doors. Let's take our final break so we don't have to interrupt this story any longer. We will be right back. You found your person. Now let the knot help you with everything else. The knot connects you to the wedding inspo, vendors, venues and planning tools you need to make your day. Totally you. Having helped plan 25 million weddings, we've got your back when it comes to every little detail like RSVP's, budgets and more. 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Hiring Indeed is all you Foreign we're back in the house with Spencer Bryden. He's been searching for ghosts there for weeks, and things tonight are coming to a head. He's still thinking about this door. It's closed. Not only did he not remember closing it, he knows he wouldn't have closed it because he likes looking through these series of rooms to see if he can catch a glimpse of a ghost. But now, maybe he caught this ghost. Someone or something has closed it. He doesn't know what to do. Back to the story. It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged. They perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He couldn't by any lapse have blocked that aperture. And if he hadn't, if it was unthinkable, why, what else was clear but that there had been another agent, another agent he had been catching, as he felt a moment back, the very breath of him. But when he had been so close, as in this simple, this logical, this completely personal act, it was so logical, that is, that one might have taken it for personal. Yet for what did Briden take it? He asked himself, while softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah. This time at last they were the two, the opposed projections of him in presence. And this time as much as one would, the question of danger loomed with it rose as not before the question of courage. For what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was, show us how much you have it stared. It glared back at him with that challenge. It put to him the two alternatives. Should he just push it open or not? Oh, to have this consciousness was to think and to think, Briden knew as he stood there was, with the lapsing moments not to have acted, not to have acted. That was the misery and the pang was even still. Not to act was in fact all to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it for his vibration had already changed, as just by the effect, its intensity shut up there at bay, defiant and with the prodigy of the thing palpably, provably done, thus Giving notice like some stark signboard under that accession of accent, the situation itself had turned. And Brian at last, remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to. It had turned altogether to a different admonition, to a supreme hint for him of the value of discretion. This slowly dawned, no doubt, for it could take its time so perfectly on his threshold had he been stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the strangest of all things that now, when by his taking 10 steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been met. His high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged. It was amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare. That insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from him discretion. He jumped at that, and yet, not verily at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he jumped at it, I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that at the end, indeed of I know not how long, he did move again. He crossed straight to the door. He wouldn't touch it. It seemed now that he might. If he would, he would only just wait there a little to show, to prove that he wouldn't. He had thus another station close to the thin partition by which revelation was denied him. But with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness, he listened as if there had been something to hear. But this attitude, while it lasted, was his own communication. If you won't, then good, I spare you and I give up. You affect me, as by the appeal, positively for pity. You convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime, what do I know? We both of us should have suffered. I respect them then. And though moved and privileged, as I believe it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce never on my honour to try again. So rest forever and let me. That, for Briden, was the deep sense of this last demonstration. Solemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to be, he brought it to a close. He turned away. And now, verily, he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed well nigh to the socket and marking again, lighten it, as he would the distinctness of his footfall, after which, in a moment he knew himself. At the other side of the house he did hear what he had not yet done at these hours. He opened half a casement, one of those in the front and let in the air of the night, a thing he would have taken at any time previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and it didn't matter. Broken by his concession and his surrender which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street, its other life so marked even by great lamp lit vacancy, was within call, within touch. He stayed there as to be in it again. High above it, though he was still perched, he watched as for some comforting common fact, some vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night bird, however base, he would have blessed that sign of life. He would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend, the policeman whom he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it on some pretext from his fourth floor. Pause there. Have you followed what's happened? He had this idea. The door is closed. I didn't close it and I wouldn't have closed it by logic. Therefore it's some agent who closed it. And by the logic of my feverish haunting dreams, the agent I assume must be my alter ego who's now in that room. And he thinks I could go, I could burst through the door, break it down even, and confront this creature I both long to confront and am terrified to confront, and which must long to meet me and be terrified to meet me too. But I don't. I won't. I can't. Out of respect for him and his apparent unwillingness to surface to me, I won't force him into it. I'll let him be, and I want him to let me be. So Briden instead goes to a window, lets in the night air, back to the story, the pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name in such a case out of the papers, was not definite to him. He was so occupied with the thought of recording his discretion as an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate adversary, that the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically, his sense of proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed somehow, astride of the window sill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent if there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire escape in the form of notched cable or a canvas chute, he would have availed himself of it as a proof well of his present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment as the question stood a little in vain, and even at the end of he scarce knew once more how long found it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response, of the outer world sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush. The life of the town was itself under a spell so unnaturally up and down, the whole prospect of known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the hard faced houses which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on often in the heart of cities for the small hours, a sort of sinister mask. And it was of this large collective negation that Briden presently became conscious all the more that the break of day was almost incredibly now at hand, proving to him what a night he had made of it. He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his time values. He had taken hours for minutes, not in, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours. And the strange air of the streets was but the week, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet, while so deeply demoralized, he was capable again of an impulse denoting, at least by his present measure, extraordinary resolution, of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his own. This required an effort strong enough to sicken him. But he had his reason, which overmastered, for the moment everything else. There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse. And how should he himself to that? If the door he had seen closed were at present open, he could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground, and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked. But what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of forbearance, his recent action, or rather his recent Inaction had engendered the image of the presence, whatever it was, waiting there for him to go. This image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For with all his resolution, or more exactly, with all his dread, he did stop short. He hung back from really seeing the risk was too great and his fear too definite. It took, at this moment, an awful specific form. Okay, pause there. So he's looking out the window. He thinks, if there was a fire escape, I'd go down it. I really don't want to walk back through that house. He realizes it's dawn. He's been there all night. What he thought was happening in minutes took hours. It's almost morning. It's time to leave. He's got to go through the house. But he thinks, what if I head back through that house and that door is open? That would tell me that the alter ego was there for sure. And it would tell me that the alter ego where I thought I was communicating with him by saying, I could open up this door, but I'm not going to. I'm not going to. It would tell me that the alter ego was saying, this is your sign. This is your chance. I am here. I am here. If the door is closed, the alter ego will still be saying, okay, I'll just shut myself in this room. You didn't want to open it, that's fine. You see, the door was closed. You didn't close it. You know I'm here, and, brother, you don't want any part of me in my ghost world. So you just keep on walking. Keep on walking. Maybe don't come back now that you have this proof that ghosts are here. That's what the closed door means. But not if it's closed, because then it could be an accident. But if it's open now, if it's open now, that's a confirmation. He thinks he didn't close the door, but he knows he didn't open it. He doesn't want to see this door either way, does he? It's closed. He knows what's in there. If it's open. He knows that something used to be in there and is not. Now let's go back to the story. He knew, yes, as he had never known anything, that should he see the door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame, for his shame was the deep objection, was once more at large and in general possession and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would determine for him. It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window be long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would. He saw himself uncontrollably, insanely, fatally take his way to the street. The hideous chance of this he at least could avert. But he could only avert it by recoiling in time from assurance he had the whole house to deal with. This fact was still there. Only he now knew that uncertainty alone could start him. He stole back from where he had checked himself. Merely to do so was suddenly like safety, and making blindly for the greater staircase left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large, dim descent and three spacious landings to mark off. His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and strangely, when he had in a couple of minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. Help. He couldn't have spoken. The tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource of whistling in the dark, whether literally or figuratively, have appeared basely vulgar. Yet he liked none the less to hear himself go. And when he had reached his first landing, taking it all with no rush but quite steadily, that stage of success drew from him a gasp of relief. The house withal seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate, the open rooms to no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns. Only the high skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but which might have been for queerness of color, some watery underworld. He tried to think of something noble as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession. But this nobleness took the form, too, of the clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers. They might come as soon as they would. At the end of the two flights he had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left, he recognized the influence of the lower windows, of half drawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of street lamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own, and which he even saw paved when at a given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the ban years with the marble squares of his childhood. By that time, indubitably, he felt as he might have Said in a commoner cause better it had allowed him to stop and draw breath, and the case increased with the sight of the old black and white slabs. But what he most felt was that now, surely with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard, firm hands, the case was settled. For what he might have seen above had he dared that last look, the closed door, blessedly remote now, was still closed. And he had only, in short, to reach that of the house. Okay, pause there. The door was closed. He dodged a bullet there, didn't he? And now he has only to make his way to the main door to get out. Kind of a harrowing trip down the stairs for our man Spencer Bryden. Except we're not out of the house yet. We're not out. We're gonna see. He has more to learn about these doors and which ones he left open and which ones he left closed. If he sees a. An anomaly, it would tell him that the agent he's imagining, the alter ego, has been moving around the house, right? Creeping like he used to do, and now he kind of wants to get out of there. What's that? He's like builders, Come on in, carve this place up. Carve it up as soon as you can. That's his mindset at this point. Okay, back to the story. He came down further. He crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight. And if here again he stopped an instant, it was almost for the sharpness of. Of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his eyes, which opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but impunity almost excessive, inasmuch as the side lights and the high fan tracery of the entrance were glimmering straight into the hall. An appearance produced he the next instant saw by the fact that the vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back out of that. Again the question sprang at him, making his eyes as he felt half start from his head, as they had done at the top of the house before the sign of the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn't he left this one closed? And wasn't he now in most immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp the question as a knife in his side. But the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague dark darkness to which the thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular margin A cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he looked, to shift and expand and contract. It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface behind the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape shape of which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with a sense that here was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to know, something all unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche, or as some black visored sentinel guarding a treasure. Briden was to know afterwards was to recall and make out the particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw in its great gray glimmering margin the central vagueness diminished, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which for so many days the passion of his curiosity had yearned, it gloomed, it loomed. It was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence, rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power, to dismay. This only, could it be this only till he recognized with his advance that what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it, and in which, so far from being offered in defiance, it was buried. As for dark deprecation, so Briden before him took him in with every fact of him now in the higher light, hard and acute, his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of evening dress, of dangling double eye glass, of gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch guard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there had been treatment of the consummate sort. In his every shade and salience the revulsion for our friend had become, before he knew it, immense, this drop in the active apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable maneuver, that meaning at last, while he gaped, it offered him, for he could but gape at his other self, in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the Achieved the enjoyed the triumphant life couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering hands strong and completely spread, so spread and so intentional that in spite of a special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers which were reduced to stumps as if accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved. Saved though would it be. Bryden breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced as he felt a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move to open. Then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented Horror with the sight had leaped into Briden's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter for the bared identity was too hideous as his and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face. That face. Spencer Bryden's. He searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility he had been sold. He inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this. The presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror. But the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous a thousand times. Yes, as it came upon him nearer now the face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood. For the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar had advanced as for aggression and he knew himself give ground then, harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock and falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed. He felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round. He was going. He had gone. Wow. That's going to do it for this, for part two of the story. Brian has met the alter ego. The face is his and it's not Spencer. Brian's. It comes at him. It's a mirror, you might say. This face, a reflection of some kind. Brian has been there all night in this weird agitated state. Maybe he's just seeing things. But it's so vivid. More vivid than any painting. And it's him. Accepted. It's dressed a little differently. Is missing two fingers. As if blown away by some kind of happenstance. A lot can happen in 33 years, right? Maybe this was a duel or something strange had happened. Some accident. The character stares at him with passionate intensity. And Bryden was going. He had gone. His personality collapsed when confronting the rage of personality in the alter ego. The creature seems to be superior to him in some way. And we are finished with part two. Part three of the Jolly Corner will come next time. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.