His intimate friend, the companion of his boyhood, the chum of his college days, his fellow-traveller in many lands, the man for whom he possessed stronger affection than for all men, had mysteriously disappeared two days ago, and his track might have sprung to the upper air for all trace he had left behind him. The women, too, were an unusually dull lot, with the exception of a new-minded debutante who bothered Weigall at dinner by demanding the verbal restoration of the vague paintings on the vaulted roof above them.īut it was no one of these things that sat on Weigall's mind as, when the other men went up to bed, he let himself out of the castle and sauntered down to the river. Whether or not the grouse had haunts of their own, wherein they were immune from rheumatism, the bag had been small.

A heavy rain had made the moor so spongy that it fairly sprang beneath the feet. The amusements of life, he argued, should be accepted with the same philosophy as its ills. But when in England in August he always accepted whatever proffered for the season, and invited his host to shoot pheasants on his estates in the South. To stand propped against a sod fence while his host's workmen routed up the birds with long poles and drove them towards the waiting guns, made him feel himself a parody on the ancestors who had roamed the moors and forests of this West Riding of Yorkshire in hot pursuit of game worth the killing. Elsewhere, ('The Greatest Good of the Greatest Number', 'The Tragedy of a Snob', and 'A Monarch of a Small Survey') the psychological takes precedence over the supernatural.Īnd in 'The Bell in the Fog' (reminiscent of 'The Turn of the Screw', and dedicated to Henry James) the supernatural and psychological combine to brilliant effect: an angelic child bears a striking resemblance to an old portrait.Weigall, continental and detached, tired early of grouse shooting. 'The Striding Place' was rejected by one editor as 'far too gruesome', but was in Atherton's view 'the best short story I ever wrote'. She eloped at the age of nineteen, took up writing against her husband's wishes, and after his death became a protegee of Ambrose Bierce, whose influence can be seen here in those stories, 'The Dead and the Countess', 'Death and the Woman' and 'The Striding Place', which have an overtly supernatural element. Gertrude Atherton was born in San Francisco in 1857, and died in 1948.

The Striding Place by Gertrude Atherton