The Spook of Cornelius

Evening Star, Issue 20982, 22 December 1931, Page 4

The Spook of Cornelius

By R. A. J. WALLING

A Christmas Eve Adventure of Mr Pinson

(From the General Press Ltd.) . [All Rights Reserved.)

Not often could Mr Pinson be induced to tell a story of his own adventures. One of the rare occasions came on the night when somebody at, the Parchment, Club started a discussion about the psychological effect of ancient surroundings. Roland Greene spoke of the “historical essences distilled into material things.” That started Mr Pinson. When he said, “I remember ” everybody else stopped talking. 1 remember (said Mr Pinson) _ a rather curious little affair which illustrates what Greene says. Two winters ago I had a letter from my friend Bob Dunsford inviting me to go and stay the Christmas weekend w’ith him at his house in Iscaster. I don’t know whether any of vou fellows have ever met Dunsford when you’ve been down there on circuit. He keeps that bookshop in High street, not far from the Castle. A very discerning and variously read person. _ I’m very fond of Iscaster, for it’s got a tmique air—one of the few unspoiled medieval towns in England. Like every other town, it’s contracted a concrete' and asbestos rash on its extremities; but so far the post-war vandals have not been allowed to work their wicked will within the walls. Still, I shouldn’t have chosen to go down to Iscaster in mid-winter if it hadn’t been for Dunsford. . I like Dunsford even better than I like Iscaster. A queer mixture of wisdom and naivette, Dunsford. An astute man of business, a student who s soaked himself in history, a charming gossip. ■. . . , Greene spoke of historical essences clinging ,about material objects. There are a few places in England where 1 seem to breathe those essences—Windsor, Bath, Coventry. But more than anywhere, Iscaster. It’s exactly the right setting for Dunsford. And that s why a man, who, they say, could have made a big fortune in London, stays in a little city and just lives comfortabTherefore, when Dunsford said he ]iad something queer to tell me and something still queerer to show me I sent him a wire giving the time or my train, and shook hands with mm on the platform at 2 o’clock on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. . “Had lunch on the tram? he inquired. “Like ho stretch your legs? AH right. I’ll get your bag sent up, and we’ll go for a walk. Y r ou know that all the railway region of Iscaster and the low lands along the river lie outside the walls. Dunsford took me through these ' drab purlieus bv the shortest cut, and we came out into a main street at the foot ot the steep hill that rises to the , c ‘U k °U l f t e south side—no. coming to thrnk of it, the west side, because when we turned off to the left we were g° in / \ dismal place we turned into—worse than the mean streets between the citv and the river-a land of back alley at the foot of a dingv cliff of tall and dilapidated houses, with clothes pol.fpoMMt ot the all the stigmata of squalor. Ihe houses were not old. hut ing affairs covered withpamtedplaster, apparently the product of tectural imagination of an ea y ‘°Aho»TTS& yard, alons tto alley Dunsford laid a hand on my arm me into a tiny yard at the Wk P o one of the houses, among the said to me; . t fniWccThim into the musty-smell-ta’ S’! H. h Ja S d s h» KStlt to tsar on the oppos.lo th ® There,” said he, “is one of the Brat thing. omlUod m Engl an- started it in the » Sius rh This is how we treat it! The houses are built on the top back.' 0 Very “Snvenmnfpiars-with half'" your foundations and your already provided for you by the Romans nearly 2 000 years agm But what I want you to see is this. Dunsford threw’ t e ea dgtone legend; CORNELIVS MASSILIE.

The second was evidently an incomplete word The sandstone had crumbled or been broken away. “I dug the plaster off a stretch ot the wall here one day when I was prowling around,” said Dunsford, “and came on this. I m going to plaster it up again, that the carving. But there you see the sign manual of one of -the litulders o the wall, Mr Cornelius Massihensis, Cornelius of Marseilles °« e _. of earliest visitors from the Rmeia, and a jolly good stonemason, who showed our British ancestors how to put up walls. I’d like to have heard his remarks on the climate.” . , • Somebody opened a door in a dark corner of the place and cried out: “Who the ruddy Oh. Beg pardon, sir,” as Dunsford threw the light of his torch ou his own face. “ I was just showing a friend our wall. Mr Cobbledick,” said Dunsford. “May we go up through? The man stood aside for us to pass, and Dunsford led me through the doorway to a narrow stair cut in the thickness of the wall. With many exclamations about sacrilege and Uunnishness, he took me through an evilsmelling passage into the street above. The remainder of our walk was by various narrow ways along the course of the Roman Wall, cut through built over, despoiled, but still traceable, to the castle on the great cliff at the north-eastern bend, and so to Dunsford’s house in a terrace facing a green pleasaunco on the city s southern slope. . , , . , “Most interesting archaeological afternoon, Dunsford,” said I, as we sat by the teacups waiting for the tea. Dunsford is a bachelor, served by an old housekeeper, who mothers him, and a maid, who holds him in awe. “ But you didn’t ask me down for that. “No-yes., Only partly,”- he re-

plied. “ I wanted you to see the wall by as much daylight as can be got on it, and to realise, if. you could, that it's nearly 2,000 years old, and was built long" before Tacitus wrote his entertaining anecdotes of Claudius and Messalina.” And then, Greene, he began %o speculate about the historical essences, much as you were doing. By the bye, he exploded a curious question on me. , “Do you believe in spooks?” he said. I don’t believe in spooks, but I parried the question, saying that I was always prepared to believe anything for which evidence could be produced, but nothing else. . . ■ That, of course, led to a discussion on the nature of evidence. I didn’t consider that the evidence for the Cock Lane Ghost was good enough to go to the jury, and I was not prepared to accept the evidence of the Fox girl that she communicated with the spirit of the murdered pedlar. And so on. I didn’t think the operation of tapping on a piece of wood was_ made any the more ethereal because Sir William Crookes called the result percussive sounds ”

Dunsforcl listened to me tolerantly ; tolerance is one of his characteristics. “ No doubt,” said he, “ you|d_ like to have the chance of cross-examining a spook and showing up all the flaws in his story. You lawyers always want to put moonbeams through the process of spectrum analysis.” “ And why not?” I asked him. “ If they’re good moonbeams, and not merely tricks with phosphorus, they come through undimmed.” Dunsford nodded at this, but he had something at the back of his _ mind which he hesitated to bring out in the unsympathetic light of my scepticism. He talked of the aura of history and the persistence of a personality in the thing created, and got into metaphysical regions where I couldn’t follow him. Then suddenly he put it all away, said: “ I’ll tell you a tale after dinner,” and proposed that we should play billiards in the meantime.

At dinner Dunsford talked gaily about a number of things, and didn’t mention, spooks again. Afterwards, we smoked, he showed me some rare books —among them a Littleton ‘ Tenores Novell! ’ in tho old Norman French—that would have interested you, Greene; and in these pastimes the went till the old housekeeper looked in to inquire whether he would want anything more, and he told her she might, lock up and go to,bed. Dunsford then jumped up and put away the books. He looked,at the clock on his library wall, which showed 11. “ I wanted them to get away upstairs/’ said he, “ so that we shouldn’t be disturbed. I’ve had a queer experience lately, Pinson. I think I’m in full possession of my senses. I’m not morbid. I don’t suffer from hallucinations. At least, I haven’t suffered to my knowledge. But this thing is so strange that I’ve been questioning my own senses. I wanted a cool mind on it—the more sceptical the better.” “ You’re making me look pretty inhuman,” I told him. He smiled at this, and said he would call it an analytical mind, if I liked that Anyhow, he wished to put his own experiences to the test of" somebody else’s judgment, and preferably that of a person who did not live in Iscaster. Once a yarn of this sort got about Iscaster, life would be impossible. “ What’s the yarn?” I asked. Dunsford stood in front of the fireplace and told it. All tho vandals of the Middle Ages and later, he said, did not live-in the lower quarters of the town. I had seen what it was in their hearts to do with a precious relic of the past down there. They had done as much, or worse, elsewhere. This very house of his was also a parasite of the wall, quite close to where the East Gate should have stood.

“ They cut into it,” ho said. “ They sprawled over it. They used bits of it. It’s been raped to make garden walks. But it was So big, so deep, so surrounded with the debris- of centuries, that they didn’t, or rather couldn’t, touch the lower courses. Considering the design of the house, I came to the conclusion long ago that at the back of a cellar, underneath and beyond this room, would be found the base of the wall itself, which would probably show Roman masonry in the same perfection as the builders left it. I had a great curiosity to see it, and some months ago I got workmen on some pretext to dig in that direction. It proved a long job, because all the rubble they dug out, the wreckage of house after house built on the site, had to be brought up through by hand. But we went on till we came to the red sandstone wail, and down_ till we came to the foot of it. Then I just made them tidy up, and cleared out the workmen. I was satisfied that here stood the most perfect bit of the wall to be found in Iscaster.”

Dunsford vent to his writing table and took a portfolio out of a drawer.

" I made some accurate measurements and sketches. Here they are. But I want you only to look at one. This one.”

Dunsford selected a sheet from the portfolio and passed it to me. It was a neat pencil sketch of a piece of wall constructed of large blocks roughly cut. In the middle was a smoothed stone, upon which appeared incised letters. "This is the wrong one,” I said. " This is the wall we saw this afternoon.”

" No,” Dunsford declared. " Look again.” " The lettering which caught my eye at- first glance was CORNELIVS jVIASSILIENSIS. At Dunsford’s insistence I examined the drawing 'in detail. The name in this instance was complete, and underneath it had been carved a smaller inscription:— AECHITECXVS KEQVIESCAT A MALTS. Dunsford looked.eagerly at me as I sat. dumbfounded by the significance of this discovery. “ No mistake?” I asked. “ It looks very clear in your drawing.” “ You shall see. As clear, clearer than many'a modern inscription,” said he. > “ Have you ” I began to ask him. “ No, I haven’t,” he answered, frowning. " For a reason. The reason I tried to convey to you.. Not that

I’m afraid, but that I can hardly ,bej» lievc my senses. I told you that. I thought it all out. ‘ Cornelius of Marseilles, Masterbuilder. Let him rest free from evil.’ Cornelius was the man who superintended the building of the Wall of Iscaster—at any rate, in the early stages. The inscription is low down in the bottom courses of the wall in each instance. Cornelius died perhaps by accident on this very spot—during the building. Imagine, Pinson I They send for the pollinctores and dress Cornelius in his finest robes. He probably has no women here to beat their breasts. His wife and daughters are far away in Massilia. _ But he may have sons to go veiled in the presence of his corpse. Who knows? See them building the funeral pile, maybe where we now sit, just outside the wall. See them putting Cornelius on it, plying the torch, feeding the blaze with oil and perfumes, and throwing into it the little things that belonged to him—his brooch, his tablets perhaps. And in many hours collecting the pile of ash that was Cornelius and placing ft in a sarcophagus that his men have made.' And then, Pinson, what more natural than to put that sarcophagus in the body of Cornelius’s wall and to identify him for ever with his master building?”

Dunsford was almost breathless, and his eyes grew bright and excited as he spoke. I looked at him with a little apprehension. " Very likely, my dear Dunsford,’* said I. “ What more natural, as you say? I shouldn't be at all surprised.Are you?” Noting my manner, Dunsford laughed a little at himself. “ What did I tell you ?” said he,- “ I want a cool and sceptical mind to help me out of this. Listen, Pinson.When I had formed this theory I decided to put it to the test. Not without some difficulty, you know—mental difficulty, I mean. -I’d been preaching against Huns and denouncing vandals ever since I could remember. However,; I determined to be'very careful, to do the least possible damage, and none that could not be remedied. The most I should destroy was a pound or two of Roman mortar. I took three nights about loosening that stone. The third night, about midnight, I got it out.Then the thing happened that scared me stiff—-I don’t mind admitting it to you—and I pushed the stone back again mighty quick.” “ What was it frightened you,-” I asked. “ A sound.”

“ Yes, Dunsford? Out with it!” “It was a sound I can only describe as a moan, repeated regularly, rising and falling, till I pushed the stone in again, and then it stopped.” Dunsford has short grey hair. It seemed to be almost bristling as ha watched for the effect of his statement on me.

“ Well, Dunsford, this is where my sceptical mind comes in. Either you had your nervous imagination wrought up to the pitch of hallucination, or else there’s a perfectly natural explanation of the fact. It’ll take more than the late Mr Cornelius to frighten me.” “Well, that may be,” said Dunsford, with a certain relaxation of his tension. “If so, it’s curious that I’ve had the same experience twice more, and the last time two nights ago, when I wrote to you.” ' “The very same?” I asked him.“You weren’t too scared to take but the stone again?” ‘•‘No,” he said; “I’d got over it, or thought I had. By daylight I felt very much as you do—that it must have been an overheated imagination, or perhaps there was some natural explanation. So within a day or two 1 tried once more. ”

“ After the servants had gone to bed at night?” I inquired. “ Yes, Of course; that was the only possible time. I couldn’t play about like that with them in the offing. And the same thing occurred. As soon as I pulled the carved stone out I heard those moans. I couldn’t face it, Pinsou, ’pen my soul. I stopped the moaning as before, and stood all of a dither, looking at the inscription, ‘ Requiescat a malis.’ 1 thought to myself, what right had I to be violating the ashes of Cornelius of Marseilles, and insulting his manes? Yes, I’d got to that stage.Remember, 1 was down there at the bottom of all things, in dead silence, at midnight, with a lantern and' my thoughts of the long dead-and-gone.-‘Requiescat a malis!’ I said, and came up, resolved that 1 would leave him alone in future. Then in the daylight again there was a revulsion against what 1 thought was sheer cowardice.And two nights ago I tried again. Same result.” * “And that’s all?” I asked.

“ Yes,” he answered, “unless ” Of course, he meant unless I was game to accompany him in a fourth experiment. If lie had not suggeste<T it 1 should have proposed it myself. But before he resumed the broken sentence I asked Dunsford to consider well the question of a natural explanation—water pipes, or a syphoning gas main.These things often made weird noises. He said he had thought out all that.But here we were, far below the level of the present town, in a wall perhaps fifteen or twenty feet thick, which had not been disturbed for nearly two thousand years. He would like to believe in a natural explanation, but—and then he made the suggestion that I should go down with him. “1 warn you, Dunsford,” said I, “that old Cornelius may shriek as much as he likes, but if we take that stone out we aren’t going to put it back again till_ we’ve found out what’s the matter with him.”

“All right, Pinson,” _ said he. “I thought that’d be your line—and that’s why ”

So we went down to the cellar.Dunsford brought a kind of storm lantern. The way was through the back part of the house, by a door giving on. a stone stairway of about twenty steps. You see that it was rather deep. We came out in what seemed to be the foundations of the house—a space some 7ft high under the arches that carried the building. It was open, from end to end. At the end opposite the foot of the stairs, which ran from the back towards the front, there was unmistakably the Roman wall, looking much as it had done in the slum we saw in the afternoon. In front of it, for a distance of 9ft or 10ft, was a deep excavation, perhaps 6ft or more deep. At any rate, when we got down there and Dunsford put his lantern on the cellar floor it stood above our heads. I noticed new concrete had been used to underpin the foot of the last archway. Dunsford said they had gone below the foundations of the house and had to underpin for safety.

The inscribed stone was in the sandstone wall near the right side, and about four courses up. Dunsford had not exaggerated its plainness in his drawing. The letters did not look exactly new cut, but they were deeply incised and clear. Dunsford had gone about the archaeological part of the business very thoroughly, In the wall above the stone he.had driven a stout staple, and on it hung a rope sling. On the ground beneath lay the little heap of mortar which he had punched out. I suppose it was what you might legitimately call an uncanny scene—two -men in dinner jackets at the bottom of a deep, raw hole, with a storm

lantern projecting their shadows on the old wall, looking askance at that injunction carved nineteen centuries ago. . “Requiescat a malis!” It seemed ,to glare at us threateningly from the stone. We had no strong intimation of speech. Not that we were afraid of our own voices, but that it seemed desirable to get the business over with as little fuss as possible. ' Dunsforcf looked at me. I nodded. He» picked up a small, thin-pointed crowbar. He signalled to me to stand by the sling. ... Then Dunsford, pale and excited, inserted the bar between the inscribed stone and its neighbour, and prised. He eased it out gentlyj first one side and then the other. I listened intently for any alien sound, but could only hear the grating of the bar and the rustling of the stone as he levered it out. I stood in front of it with the first loop of the sling ready, and hitched it round the stone when Dunsford had got it out about six inches.

“Half of it!” he said hoarsely, and .went on heaving. Then—it’s difficult to believe, I know; but this is exact—l’d pushed the first loop home and got the second one round the stone when it swung out of ,the wall suddenly, and on the instant a sound came out like a cry of pain. ■Dunsford said a moan, but I should rather describe it as a faint squeal repeated as though the sufferer expired it with every breath. Dunsford, trembling, gave one look Sit me and shoved the stone back. Imjmediately the sound ceased. “You heard?” he asked, leaning his fcrowbar_ against the wall and staring Sc the inscription. “Yes, Dunsford,” said I. “But I fwarned you that I wouldn’t stand any nonsense from Cornelius. Look here, man! —you hold the -sling, and give me ,the crowbar!”

■ Dunsford, without a word, picked up "the bar and handed it to me, 1 and took hold of the sling. I set my teeth and prised out the stone again, not so gingerly as Dunsford had done. As soon as it was clear of the wall and the light entered the cavity the moaning or squealing began again. I could feel Dunsford' trembling as he stood touching me.

“Lower it,” said I, “and hold the ifantem here.” When the yellow light was thrown into the hole I saw at the back of it a quantity of loose.nibble. I dug this but with the bar, and scooped it on to The floor with my hands. It disclosed » stone of another colour. Dunsford, holding the lantern above his head, peered across my shoulder. “The sarcophagus!” said he. “Stand back, Dunsford,” I told him. i“Here goes!” That moaning note had become maddening.

I drew back to get impulse for a mighty plunge of the bar, crashed it into the edge of the yellow stone, and wrenched sideways. A grating, then a crumbling, and finally a collapse. The stone broke and fell in several pieces. The moaning rose to great intensity for an instant, and then silence came like a bomb. A little cloud of dust, or vapour, floated out into the light of the lantern and vanished. Dunsford staggered against the wall and leaned .there gasping. In the absence of that incessantly • pulsating moan we could hear our own quick _ breathing. Neither of us said anything for a moment or two. Then, to ease the strain, I remarked: “ It’s like the djinn and the bottle, Dunsford. Wo seem to have done old Cornelius a hit of good by letting him out, eh?” But. Dunsford’s nerves had been racked for the fourth time, and he could not take it lightly. “What have we done, Pinson?” he said. “ It’s a desecration!”

But, I toM him, in for a penny in for a pound. Now that I had started sacrilege I meant to go on with it. I took the lantern, reached into the hole, and brought out a handful of grey dust. Good heavens, man!” Dunsford cried. _ “ Put it back. You understand ,what it is?”

But I felt in the cavity among the dust until I came across ■ something solid and pulled it forth. In the lantern light we examined it, and it was a very workmanlike pair of dividers in .wrought iron slightly oxidised, but recognisable and even serviceable. -There was no doubt that we had broken into the sarcophagus of Cornelius Massiliensis. It consisted of six stone slabs _ about 2in thick neatly joined. In it were the ashes of the Master Builder of the Wall of Iscaster, and this_ implement of his trade had been buried with him. Dunsford was much shaken. But as We heard the moaning no more, once the tomb had been pierced, he began to recover his nerve. He insisted that everything should be restored. We fixed up the broken slab as well as we could, and placed the inscribed stone ia its cavity. Dunsford, the most abstemious of men, took a very strong dose when we returned to the open air. He was so horrified by the'' notion that he had desecrated a grave that he pledged me to the most absolute secrecy about the cellar and the stone even, to say nothing of what had happened that night. On Christmas Morning we walked out to attend the cathedral service. He explained that the wall ran behind the houses all down the pleasant terrace where he lived. On the other side of it were city streets. Dunsford-gave me a motor drive into the country in the afternoon, and on Bank Holiday we played golf. The next morning I paid a visit to the local branch of the Great Western Bank, and then I came hack to town. On the whole a very jolly holiday.

A weird yarn, Pinson,” said Roland Greene. “ Did you bring it to the notice of the psychical research people?” “ Oh, no,” protested Mr Pinson. ■ How could IP Dunsford placed me under the most solemn obligation not to mention it.”

“ Then it’s jolly unsportsmanlike of you to have shouted it in a whispering gallery like this smoke room,” observed a young member.

Mr Pinson smiled across at him. ■ ‘ It’s splendid,” he said, “ to see youth upholding Incorrupta fkles. Justitim sorror.”

“ Then why ?” ‘‘Look here, Pinson,” said Sir William Anwyn. from his corner by the fire, “ do you keep little bank balances in all the odd branches on the Western Circuit?”

Only wish I could,” Mr Pinson replied, shaking his head. “ Then why did you call at the Iscaster branch of the Great Western Bank?”

Oh, just to say how-de-do to the manager. He wrote to me a day or 'two later to thank me for the call, and sent me a newspaper cutting. It described what the newspaper called a daring attempt to break into the bank. The strong room of the bank, it seemed, was a splendid job of 3in steel embedded in 3ft of concrete. It had been built into the basement at the back of the premises, which rested against the City Wall. On Saturday morning the manager, on going into the strong room, saw that a small hole had been pierced in the steel, evidently from the outside, and it was long before anybody could divine how the wopkl-be burglars had got at the back of the premises*

Indeed, surveyors and mensurators and all sorts of experts had to be called in before the exact position of the back of the strong room could be located. The police then found that a place called St. Cuthbert’s House, next door to Dunsford’s, which had been empty for a long time on account of its .size, was taken at a big rent three months before by some people apparently quite respectable, who had now suddenly gone. They seemed, indeed, to have flitted during the Friday night. In the cellar, which backed on to the Roman Wall, they had made an excavation into the wall, tunnelled through the middle of it until they reached the back of the bank, and there made what the miners call a stope—a cave big enough to work in. In this cavity they had left a whole equipment of drills and tools, including an oxy-acetyleitc flame producer.- They had cut away the concrete over a space of 3ft square, and drilled four holes in the steel, one of which had gone through, and was therefore visible to the manager. The police thought they must have been disturbed in the very last operation they’d undertaken, though what could have disturbed them was a mystery. Another hour or two with the flame at work and they’d have had a hole in the steel big enough to get through, and would have been able to rifle the strong room and get away at their ease. The experts estimated that they must have been at work some weeks to accomplish what they did. “You know the squealing, complaining, jerky noise a. hand-worked drill makes in steel, don’t you? Dunsford and 1 know what disturbed them at the last moment if the police don’t. It was .the spook of old Massiliensis.”