The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

Sir Tristram Goes West

Eric Keown

Location: Ararat, Florida, USA.

Time: Autumn, 1934.

Eyewitness Description: “The story goes that his father, a fire-eating old Royalist, got so bored at always finding his son mooning about in the library when he might have been out trailing Cromwell, that when he was dying he laid a curse on Tristram which can only be expunged by a single-handed act of valour . . .”

Author: Eric Oliver Dilworth Keown (1860–1963) was born in Mobile, Alabama, where his family were involved in the oil industry. After majoring in literature at Alabama University, he began writing humorous stories and sketches for American magazines. At the turn of the century Keown moved to Britain, settled in the pretty Surrey village of Worplesdon and became a regular contributor to Punch magazine. He wrote numerous comic sketches, scripts for several British comedy films and biographies of two popular English actresses, Peggy Ashcroft and Margaret Rutherford. Keown’s hilarious tale of a ghost being shipped across the Atlantic when the family mansion is transported to Florida was spotted in Punch in 1935 by producer Alexander Korda, fresh from his triumph filming H. G. Wells’ Things To Come, and adapted for the screen as The Ghost Goes West. Directed by Rene Clair, the picture starred Robert Donat in the dual role of clan chief and ghost and Eugene Pallete as the American millionaire. The script by Geoffrey Kerr got in some sly digs at American imperialism and with Special Effects designer Ned Mann creating a series of convincing supernatural illusions, the result was a classic ghost movie, a big success at the box office and one still regularly reshown on late night TV.

Three men sat and talked at the long table in the library of Moat Place. Many dramatic conversations had occurred in that mellow and celebrated room, some of them radically affecting whole pages of English history; but none so vital as this to the old house itself. For its passport was being viséd to the United States.

Lord Mullion sighed gently. He was wondering whether, if a vote could be taken amongst his ancestors – most of whose florid portraits had already crossed the Atlantic – they would condemn or approve his action. Old Red Roger, his grandfather, would have burnt the place round him rather than sell an inch of it. But then Red Roger had never been up against an economic crisis. And at that moment, the afternoon sun flooding suddenly the great oriel window, a vivid shaft of light stabbed the air like a rapier and illuminated Mr Julius Plugg’s chequebook, which was lying militantly on the table.

“Would you go to forty thousand?” asked Lord Mullion.

Mr Plugg’s bushy eyebrows climbed a good half-inch. When they rose further a tremor was usually discernible in Wall Street.

“I’ll say it’s a tall price for an old joint,” he said. “Well – I might.”

Lord Mullion turned to the Eminent Architect. “You’re absolutely certain that the house can be successfully replanted in Mr Plugg’s back garden, like a damned azalea?”

The Eminent Architect, whose passion happened to be Moat Place, also sighed. “Bigger houses than this have been moved. It’ll be a cracking job, but there’s no real snag. I recommend that for greater safety the library be sent by liner. The main structure can go by cargo-boat.”

The shaft of sunlight was still playing suggestively on the golden cover of the chequebook. Sadly Lord Mullion inclined his head.

“Very well, Mr Plugg. It’s yours,” he said.

A gasp of childish delight escaped the Pokerface of American finance. “That’s well,” he cried, “that’s dandy! And, now it’s fixed, would you give me the the low-down on a yarn I’ve heard about a family spook? Bunk?”

“On the contrary,” said Lord Mullion, “he’s quite the most amusing ghost in this part of the country. But I shouldn’t think he’ll bother you.”

“Anyone ever seen him?”

“I saw him yesterday, sitting over there by the window.”

Mr Plugg sprang round apprehensively. “Doing what?” he demanded.

“Just dreaming. He was a poet, you know.”

“A poet? Hey, Earl, are you getting funny?”

“Not a bit. We know all about him. Sir Tristram Mullion, laid out by a Roundhead pike at Naseby. He must have been pretty absent-minded; probably he forgot about the battle until somebody hit him, and then it was too late. The story goes that his father, a fire-eating old Royalist, got so bored at always finding his eldest son mooning about the library when he might have been out trailing Cromwell that when he was dying he laid a curse on Tristram which could only be expunged by a single-handed act of valour. Tristram rode straight off to Naseby and got it in the neck in the first minute. So he’s still here, wandering about this library, never getting a chance to do anything more heroic than a couplet. And he wasn’t even a particularly good poet.”

Mr Plugg had regained command of himself. “I seem to have read somewhere of a ghost crossing the Atlantic with a shack,” he said, “but that won’t rattle a tough baby like me, and I doubt if your spook and I’d have much in common. How about having the lawyers in and signing things up?”

The S.S. Extravaganza was carving her way steadily through the calm and moonlit surface of the Atlantic. The thousand portholes in her steep sides blazed, and the air was sickly with the drone of saxophones. It was as though a portion of the new Park Lane had taken to the water.

Down in the dim light of No. 3 Hold a notable event had just taken place. Sir Tristram Mullion had emerged from nowhere and was standing there, very nearly opaque with surprise and irritation. His activities had been confined to the Moat Place library for so long that he could think of no good reason why he should suddenly materialize in this strange dungeon. That it was a dungeon he had little doubt. Its sole furniture was a number of large packing-cases marked “JULIUS PLUGG, ARARAT, USA”, and they were too high for even a ghost to sit upon with comfort. Tristram decided to explore.

The first person he encountered in the upper reaches of the ship was Alfred Bimsting, a young steward, who cried, “The Fancy Dress ain’t on till tomorrow, Sir,” and then pardonably fainted as he saw Tristram pass clean through a steel partition . . .

Sitting up on high stools at the bar, Professor Gupp, the historian, and an unknown Colonel were getting all argumentative over the Extravaganza’s special brown sherry.

“My dear fellow,” the Professor was saying, “whatever you may say about Marston Moor, Naseby showed Rupert to be a very great cavalry leader. Very great indeed.”

“Nonsense!” growled the Colonel. “A hot-headed young fool. Fairfax was the better soldier in every way.”

“I tell you—” the Professor began when he became aware of a presence at his elbow – a handsome young man in the clothes of a Cavalier.

“Frightfully sorry to interrupt,” said Tristram (for acquaintance with the young Mullions had kept his idiom level with the fashion), “but as a matter of fact I used to know Rupert and Fairfax pretty well, and you can take it from me they were a couple of insufferable bores. Rupert was a shockin’ hearty, always slappin’ you on the back, and Fairfax was a pompous old fool. As for Naseby, it was a hell of a mess.”

Professor Gupp hiccupped. “Young man,” he said reprovingly, “I am driven to conclude that you have been drinking to excess. It may interest you to know that I am the author of the standard monograph on Naseby.”

“It may interest you to know,” Tristram cried rather dramatically, “that I was killed there.” And he faded through the black glass wall of the refrigerator with such startling ease that neither Professor Gupp nor the Colonel could ever face Very Old Solera again . . .

After the dazzle of strip-lights and chromium Tristram was glad to find himself out on the promenade deck, which was deserted. It was nearly three hundred years since he had been to sea, returning from the French Court in considerable disgrace, having lost his dispatches; but, aided by the traditional adaptability of the ghost and the aristocrat, he noted with unconcern the tremendous pace at which the waves were flying past and the vast scarlet funnels towering above, which seemed to him to salute the moon so insuitably (he was a poet, remember) with great streamers of heavy black smoke. As he paced the deck he meditated the opening rhymes of a brief ode to the heavens . . .

Meanwhile, in the the convenient shadow of Lifeboat 5, a stout politician was surprised to find himself proposing marriage to his secretary, who with a more practised eye had seen it coming ever since Southampton. He was warming up to it nicely. Not for nothing had he devoted a lifetime to the mastery of circumambient speech.

“And though I cannot offer you, my dear, either the frivolities of youth or the glamour of an hereditary title, I am asking you to share a position which I believe to carry a certain distinction—” Here he broke off abruptly as Tristram appeared in the immediate neighbourhood and leaned dreamily over the rail.

There was an embarrassing silence, of which the secretary took advantage to repair the ravages of the politician’s first kiss.

“Would you oblige me, Sir, by going away?” he boomed in the full round voice that regularly hypnotised East Dimbury into electing him.

Tristram made no answer. He was trying hard to remember if “tune” made an impeccable rhyme to “moon”.

“Confound you, Sir,” cried the Politician, “are you aware that you are intruding upon a sacred privacy?”

Tristram genuinely didn’t hear. He was preparing to let “boon” have it, or, if necessary, “loon”.

The Politician heaved his bulk out of his deck chair and fetched Tristram a slap on the shoulder. But of course as you can’t do that with a properly disembodied matured-in-the-wood ghost, all that happened was that the Politician’s hand sank through Tristram like a razor through dripping and was severely bruised on the rail. It was left to the secretary to console him, for Tristram was gone.

And then, rumours of Tristram’s strange interludes percolating through the ship, all at once he became the centre of a series of alarming enfilading movements. The young Tuppenny-Berkeleys and their friends, who had been holding a sausage-and-peignoir party in the swimming-bath, bore down upon him waving Leberwursts and crowing “Tally-ho! The jolly old Laughing Cavalier!” Cavalierly was the way he treated them. Sweeping off his hat to young Lady Catherine, he nodded coldly to the others and walked straight through his brother, a young Guardsman, who was to dine out on the experience for nearly half a century.

The main staircase was already blocked with excited passengers. At the top of it stood the Chief Stewardess, a vast and imposing figure. Just for fun (for he was beginning to enjoy his little outing – and so would you if you had been stuck in a mouldy library for three hundred years) Tristram flung his arms gallantly round her neck and cried, “Your servant, Madam!” The poor woman collapsed mountainously into the arms of a Bolivian millionaire, who consequently collapsed too, in company with the three poorer millionaires who were behind him.

At this point the Captain arrived and advanced majestically. To the delight of the company Tristram picked up a large potted palm and thrust it dustily into his arms² Then, with a courtly bow to the crowd and a valedictory gesture of osculation, he disappeared backwards through a massive portrait of Albert The Good.

On the way back to No. 3 Hold he sped through the Athenian Suite. In it the new lord of Moat Place lay on his bed in his pink silken underwear, pondering on the triumph with which in a few months he would spring upon the markets the child of his dreams, his new inhumane killer for demolishing the out-of-date buildings of the world, Plugg’s Pneumatic Pulveriser.

Tristram took one look at him and disliked him at sight. On the bed table lay a basin of predigested gruel. Inverting it quickly over Mr Plugg’s head, he passed on to disappear into the bowels of the ship.

Blowzy Bolloni and Redgat Ike sat at a marble-topped table sinking synthetic gin with quiet efficiency. They had spent the afternoon emptying several machine-guns into a friend, so they were rather tired.

“I’ve given Bug and Toledo the line-up,” Bolloin said. “It’s a wow. Toledo’s in cahoots with one of Plugg’s maids and she spilled the beans. The stuff’s in his new safe in the library – see? Any hop-head could fetch it out. Is that oke?”

“Mebbe it’ll mean a grand all round, eh?” asked Redgat.

“Or two.” And Bolloni winked.

“That’ll be mighty nice. You want my ukulele?”

“Yeah. But I got a hunch heaters’ll be enough.”

They called for another snort of hooch, testing its strength in the approved gangster way by dipping a finger in it. The nail remaining undissolved, they drank confidently.

In the library of the reassembled Moat Place, Julius Plugg squirmed on a divan and cursed his folly in not entrusting the secret plans of his Pulveriser to the strong-room of his factory. Only a simp would have asked for it by bringing them home, he told himself bluntly. But it was too late now to do anything about them, for he was roped down as tightly as a thrown steer. Also he was gagged with his own handkerchief, a circumstance which gave him literally a pain in the neck.

Mrs Plugg, similarly captive in the big armchair had shed her normal dignity in a way which would have startled the Ararat Branch of the Women’s Watch and Ward Fellowship, over which she presided. Her head was completely obscured by a large wicker wastepaper-basket, and through it there filtered strange canine noises.

As for Hiram Plugg, the leader of sophomore fashion, he was lashed so firmly to the suit of armour in the corner that it positively hurt him to blink; for before the high rewards of ace-gunning had attracted Blowzy Bolloni to the civilization of the West he had helped his father with his fishing-nets in Sicily, and it was now his boast that he could tie a victim up quicker and more unpleasantly than any other gangster in the States.

At the back of the library Redgat Ike lounged gracefully on the table with a finger curled ready round the trigger of a Thompson submachine-gun, trained on the door. He grinned amiably as he thought how bug-house the servants had looked as they went down before his little chloroform-squirt, the cook clutching a rolling-pin and the butler muttering he’d rung the cops already – the poor bozo not knowing the wire had been cut an hour before. Oh, it was a couple of grands for nothing, a show like this. Redgat couldn’t think why every one wasn’t a gangster.

Bolloni and Toledo and the Bug, who had been searching the panels for signs of the safe, gave it up and gathered round the prostrate form of Mr Plugg, who snarled at them as fiercely as he could manage through his nose.

“Come on, Mister,” said Bolloni, “we ain’t playing Hunt the Slipper any more. You’d better squawk where that tin box is and its combination. Otherwise my boyfriend over there might kinda touch his toy by mistake, and that’s goodbye to that teapot dome of yours.” He smiled evilly at Redgat, who smiled back and swung the machine-gun into line with Mr Plugg’s bald head.

“Have his comforter out and see what he says,” suggested Toledo. But, shorn of much pungent criticism of the gangsters and their heredity, all Mr Plugg said was, “There’s no safe here, you big bunch of saps.”

Most sailormen are practical and many are crude. Bolloni was both. Replacing the gag in Mr Plugg’s champing jaws, he drew from his pocket a twelve-bore shot-gun sawn off at the breech and pressed it persuasively against Mr Plugg’s ample stomach. With his other hand he took a firm grip of the magnate’s moustache and began to heave.

“When you sorta remember about the safe,” he said, “give three toots on your nose.”

Who would blame Mr Plugg? Gathering together his remaining breath, he let out a first toot which would have done honour to a Thames tug. He was filling up with air for a second one when suddenly the three gangsters sprang round as if stung. Painfully he turned his head, to see a strange figure standing by the bookshelves. (You’ve got it first guess. It was.)

Tristram hadn’t noticed the others. He was poring over a set of Spenser when Redgat slid back his trigger, and it was not until a heavy .45 bullet tore the book from his hand that he realized that something was happening. A stream of lead was hurtling through him and turning a priceless edition of Boccaccio to pulp, but he felt nothing. He was filled only with resentment at such ill-mannered interruption.

None of the gangsters had ever seen a man take fifty bullets in the chest and remain perpendicular. The sight unnerved them. Redgat continued to fire as accurately as before, but the other three stood irresolute.

Before Bolloni could dodge him Tristram had picked up what was left of The Faëry Queen and brought it down with terrific force on his head, dropping him like a skittle. Boiling with rage, Tristram grabbed up The Anatomy of Melancholy and set about Toledo and the Bug. One of them discharged the shotgun full in his face, but not with any great hope – Gee! a ritzy guy in fancy-dress who only got fresher after a whole drum of slugs!

It was soon over. Redgat clung to his beloved machine-gun to the end, unable to believe that a second drum wouldn’t take effect. But he, too, went down to a thundering crack on the jaw from an illustrated Apocrypha . . .

Tristram began to feel very odd. For a moment he surveyed the scene, not quite comprehending what it all meant. Mrs Plugg had swooned, which merely caused the wastepaper-basket on her head to drop from the vertical to the horizontal. Her son was clearly about to be sick. Julius Plugg, himself supine but undaunted, was making wild signals with his famous eyebrows to be released.

Then, something in his nebulous inside going queerly click, Tristram realized what was happening. At last he had been a hero. At last he was free. The hail of bullets had smashed up not only Boccaccio but his father’s curse . . .

Debating, with the exquisite detachment of the poet, whether the Pluggs would be free before the gangsters recovered, he faded imperceptibly and left them to it.