The Proper Place by O Douglas
published 1926
[excerpt] Dr. Kilgour had already drunk two large cups of tea, and
was enormously enjoying the hot scones and the feather-light “dropped” scones.
“Curious eerie time, Hallowe’en,” he remarked; “cold winds,
cabbage runts, red apples, and looking-glasses! You know the superstition that
if a girl looks into the glass at midnight on Hallowe’en, she’ll see the man
she’s to wed? A farmer’s wife near here, I’ve been told, advised the pretty
kitchen-maid to go and look. The girl came back—‘Sic blethers,’ she said, ‘I
only saw the maister an’ his black dowg.’
‘Be kind to ma bairns,’ said her mistress, and before
Hallowe’en came round again she was dead, and the kitchen-lass reigned in her
stead. . . . What d’you think of that, Miss Symington?”
“It’s not very likely to be true,” Miss Symington said
prosaically.
Lady Jane laughed. “It’s a good tale, anyway,” she said.
“Pass Alastair the chocolate biscuits, Nikky. Babs dear, will you cut the cake.
. . .”
Immediately after tea a small wooden tub half full of water
was set on a bath-mat by the careful Christina in the middle of the
drawing-room floor, the apples were poured in, and Barbara stirred them about
with a porridge stick, while Nicole knelt on the seat of a chair, with a fork
in her hand…She hung over the back of the chair waiting an opportunity to drop
the fork among the rosy bobbing apples. She chose her time badly and the fork
slid harmless to the bottom of the tub.
comments: We are in The Harbour House in a small Scottish town. This
is a serious comedown for the family who have just moved there from their posh house in the country, but sounds quite acceptable to the rest of us.
New friends have gathered for this small Halloween party: a
classic O Douglas setting. I thought the doctor’s story was quite
extraordinarily unnerving, and it has stuck in my mind since I read the book.
(I explained earlier
in the year how I came to binge on O Douglas, courtesy of
blogfriend Shay: and there is another post
on this book here)
Their method of ducking for apples – trying to spear them with a fork – was unfamiliar to me. As in Agatha Christie’s Halloween Party (though with less desperate results), our custom was to lean into the tub to grab the apples with your teeth.
The book tells the story of three women who are running out of money and have to sell their lovely house to a nouveau riche Glasgow family – in trade, obv. The two families keep up a solid connection, and The Proper Place of the title is a reference to who belongs where. The author doesn’t have much time for social mobility, though Mrs Jackson, the new lady of the manor, is a lovely and well-drawn character: Douglas pokes gentle fun at her, but also shows her good heart and lack of pretension.
Similar fortune-telling apparently took place in Russia on Twelfth Night - all gone into in this post on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Twelfth Night: Fortune-Telling in Russia
There'll be more on apple-ducking later in the week.
This does sound properly eerie, Moira. And I thought of Hallowe'en Party , too! It's just the right sort of story for the time of year. I like the sense of atmosphere just from the bits you've shared.
ReplyDelete