Plot:

Forty-four-year-old novelist Paul Oleron rents the first floor of a house to finish his novel, Romilly Bishop. He has fifteen chapters. He needs a quiet, pleasant place to concentrate. The house needs a bit of sprucing up. He hires people to paint and then moves in some furniture he has in storage that his grandmother left him. Everything is perfect.

…except he can’t concentrate. Too much noise comes in from the street. He goes for walks. He’s made no progress, though his funds are finite, and his publisher is expecting a new book by fall.

The dripping tap distracts him. He hears a rhythm in it. He hums a tune with the same rhythm. The housekeeper tells him it’s an old ditty called “The Beckoning Fair One” that he doesn’t know.

An old friend, Elsie Bengough, visits one day. Elsie, the author tells the reader, is “an unattached journalist of thirty-four, large, showy, fair as butter, pink as a dog-rose, reminding one of a florist’s picked specimen bloom, and given to sudden and ample movements and moist and explosive utterances.”

Oleron is in the habit of showing her his work. He trusts her judgment. “She, in return for his confidence, always kept all mention of her own work sedulously from him. His, she said, was ‘real work’; hers merely filled space, not always even grammatically,” the author says.

Hmmm…

Oleron tells her he’s thinking of rewriting the character of Romilly.

Elsie objects. When she opens a window to let in air, she injures her hand on a nail. Oleron is mortified. He thought he had removed all nails from the shut windows while renovating the house. She leaves, refusing his offers of help.

While Oleron is drowsing before a fire, thinking of the new Romilly, he hears a noise that could only be someone brushing long hair. He now believes he’s not alone in the house, and the other presence is hostile to Elsie.

When his friend next stops by, she doesn’t even enter the house. Her foot falls through the steps leading up to the porch. Again, she refuses help. She says, “I’m not wanted,” and leaves, promising to visit a doctor.

Oleron himself changes, sees fewer reasons to leave the house, and doesn’t answer reasonable questions from his publisher about the promised manuscript.

Thoughts:

This is a sad little tale. Oleron doesn’t have a perfect life but throws away what he has in pursuit of perfection.  “When I have things this way, then I’ll create my masterpiece,” he seems to say. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

“Youth always thinks it knows; then one day it discovers it is nearly fifty,” he tells Elsie.

To add insult to injury, Oleron has already realized this. He realizes Romilly’s character is based on Elsie, and that if he asked, Elsie would marry him. Elsie tells him he will never finish his book in the house, despite how nicely he’s fixed it up. On some level, Elsie is aware of another presence/ghost/woman or something between the two of them, though she never articulates it.

Some reader see it as all a product of Oleron’s imagination and the tragedy that follows as a result of a psychotic break, not ghostly revenge.

Because much of it takes place in Oleron’s head, the story may strike the modern reader as a little slow. Outside of warnings about renting the house, little tells the reader of the horror to come, though it builds as Oleron slowly loses his grip on the everyday world.

This is sad, but worth a read if the reader is patient.



The story can be read here.

Listen to via Librivox here.

Bio: Oliver Onions (1873-1961) was a British writer, born Oliver George Onions. He legally changed his name to Oliver George but continued to use Oliver Onions to publish. He trained as a commercial artist. He later came to be known for his ghost stories and stories of the fantastic, often dealing with reality and perception.

Title: “The Beckoning Fair One
Author: Oliver Onions (1873-1961)
First published: Widdershins, January 17, 1911