29) The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford

Plot:

This is a club story, that is, framed as a tale told by a member of a gentlemen’s club. (In the nineteenth century, it meant a private place where men hung out, smoked and drank. It didn’t mean the present-day sense where men hang out smoke, drink and watch women dance and take their clothes off.) The stories can relate accounts of adventure, derring-do, or, as in the present example, old-fashioned yarns of tangles with the supernatural.

According to the narrator, Brisbane is a strong man, even stronger than he looks. He breaks walnuts with his bare hands. He’s about thirty-five years old. “His head is small, his hair is thin, his eyes are blue, his nose is large, he has a small moustache, and a square jaw.”

Much to the disbelief of his fellows, he tells them he has seen a ghost. And once he’s said this, the party is back on.

His business takes him back and forth across the Atlantic often. The Kamtschatka was one of his favorite ships, but no longer. Members of the crew know him on sight. When he announces his cabin number—105, lower berth—the steward reacts in such a way that Brisbane wonders if he was “the better for a glass.”

“I was wrong,” he tells his fellows, “and did the man injustice.”

He turns in early and finds, to his disappointment, that he has a roommate. A portmanteau, like his own, lies in the opposite corner. The upper berth has a rug and umbrella strewn across it.

When his roomie arrives, Brisbane’s in bed. He instantly looks down his nose at the stranger he watches through the slit in his curtains and declines to make his acquaintance. Sometime in the night, the roomie jumps from his berth and runs out of the cabin, leaving the door open. Annoyed, Brisbane gets up to shut it, composing a sternly worded lecture. He wakes again, feeling cold. The cabin smells of seawater. He hears someone (his roomie? Maaaaybe.) turning and perhaps groaning above him, ascribing the whole business to seasickness.

In the morning, he wakes alone in the room. News comes of a missing man.

Thoughts:

Brisbane is a skeptic. When he hears rumors that several of the former passengers in his cabin taking their lives by jumping overboard in the middle of the night, he brushes it off as a set of singular tragedies. It certainly doesn’t mean the ship is haunted because thar ain’t no such things as ghosts, ya know.

That thing with the porthole always being open? It’s the fault of an inattentive steward.

Despite receiving offers to stay in another cabin, he likes the idea that he no longer has to share and stays put. Unfortunately, he finds he’s not entirely alone.

This is creepy, with warnings from the steward and a doctor Brisbane meets during the day.

“It’s just what I call fuggly weather,” the doctor says at one point.

It’s safe to say the word “fuggly” probably had a different meaning in 1886.

There is also some humor. In the beginning, the narrator pokes fun at some of the club members’ attempts at conversation. Among them is Mr. Tompkins, of Boston, who “explained at elaborate length those working principles, by the due and careful maintenance of which the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad not only extended its territory, increased its departmental influence, and transported live stock without starving them to death before the day of actual delivery, but, also, had for years succeeded in deceiving those passengers who bought its tickets into the fallacious belief that the corporation aforesaid was really able to transport human life without destroying it.”

This was a creepy little tale. I liked it.

The story can be read here.

An audio version is available here:

Bio:  F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909) was born in Italy to American parents. His father was the sculptor Thomas Gibson Crawford, who died while the author was a toddler. Crawford’s first novel, Mr. Issacs (1882), depicted Anglo-Indian life with an added touch of Theosophy, perhaps reflecting his time in India studying Sanskrit. It was successful, though today, he is best known for his story reviewed above.

Title: “The Upper Berth”
Author: F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909)
First published: Unwin’s Annual for 1886, The Broken Shaft: Tales in Mid-Ocean, 1885