“A Pair of Hands” was written by A.T. Quiller-Couch and first appeared in The Cornish Magazine (December 1898). Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944) was a British poet, novelist, and critic who wrote under the pseudonym of “Q.” He was known in his lifetime not just for his writing but also as an educator and lecturer. Quiller-Couch was prolific, and like most of his work, “A Pair of Hands” is excellent.

“A Pair of Hands” begins with the elderly Emily Le Petyt telling her daughters and nieces about how she not only has seen a ghost, but actually lived with one for a long while. As a young woman she rented a house on the coast of Cornwall. The house had formerly been rented by various bad people, from drinkers to child-abusing colonials, so that the farmer who owns the house is suspicious of Emily. Eventually he trusts her enough to rent the house to her. He insists on one condition, however: the housekeeper, Mary Carkeek, has to stay at the house. Emily is dubious, but the house is charming and Mrs. Carkeek is a kindly middle-aged woman who Emily quickly takes to, so Emily accepts the condition and rents the house. Emily discovers almost immediately that the housework is done amazingly quickly and that everything is just as neat and tidy as she could wish for. In fact, when Emily wishes aloud for fresh roses on the dining table, the roses are there the next day, even though Emily did not say anything to Mrs. Carkeek about it. At first Emily thinks that Mrs. Carkeek does the housekeeping after Emily has gone to bed, but Emily notices too many oddities for her own comfort, and she is certain that Mrs. Carkeek is hiding something. Too, Emily feels unusually loved while in the house. One night Emily hears water running. She turns the tap off and returns to bed, only to wake up hours later and hear the tap running again. She goes back to the kitchen and sees a pair of small girl’s hands, washing themselves clean under the tap. The hands end after the wrist. Seeing this, Emily drops her candle and runs. The next morning she asks Mrs. Carkeek about it. Mrs. Carkeek tells her that the former owner of the house was Squire Kendall and that his daughter, Margaret died over twenty years ago, aged seven, of diphtheria. It is Margaret who has been doing the housework, and it is Margaret who has taken to Emily so much and made her feel loved. Emily is a much better tenant than the previous ones, after all, and probably a better one than future tenants will be. Emily spends three years at the house, until the farmer who owns the house sells to it Colonel Kendall, Margaret’s uncle. Emily has to leave, and she does, sadly, but before she leaves she slips into the pantry and calls out Margaret’s name:

“There was no answer at all. I had scarcely dared to hope for one. Yet I tried again, and, shutting my eyes this time, stretched out both hands and whispered:

“And I will swear to my dying day that two little hands stole and rested–for a moment only–in mine.”¹

It is interesting what a difference talent makes. In the hands of a lesser writer this story might be mawkish and overly sentimental. But Q is such a deft hand at creating character and situation that the story ends up being sad and sweet, just like he intended, and its ending is fitting and even affecting. Although Q repeats the housekeeping spirit motif he used in “The Laird’s Luck,” the tone of “A Pair of Hands” is different enough that it does not feel like he is repeating himself.

The sentimental style of ghost story that Q tells in “A Pair of Hands” was more typical of mid-century ghost stories, both British and American, than of the stories being written in 1898, in the middle of what horror scholars call the “Golden Age” of British horror,² which ran roughly from 1880 to 1920 and especially from 1894 to 1907, when Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Lord Dunsany—informally, the Machen Quartet--“created a significant discontinuity”³ from previous forms and modes of horror. In mid-century ghost stories, sentimental and bittersweet plots, characters, and story endings were allowed, encouraged, and often expected. When the Machen Quartet began writing, all that changed, and a primary expectation on the reader’s part was that a ghost story should actually scare the reader. In 1898, Q was a holdover from the old school of ghost story writers, and his work was distinctly out of style. It’s this aspect of being a literary dinosaur, perhaps that leads otherwise sensible critics to scorn Q, a contempt that is misguided, as “A Pair of Hands” and “The Roll Call of the Reef” demonstrate.

Print: Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Horror on the Stair and Other Weird Stories. Ashcroft, BC: Ash-Tree Press, 2000.

¹ Arthur Quiller-Couch, “A Pair of Hands,” Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts, Project Gutenburg, accessed Feb. 11, 2019, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13799/pg13799-images.html

² Jess Nevins, Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century: Exploring Literature’s Most Chilling Genre (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2020), 11.

³ Nevins, Horror Fiction in the 20^th Century, 10.