A Dark night's Work and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

The Case of the Phantom Cat

The other night Josh and I were in our front room.  We have two living rooms; the front room has a bay window that faces the street.  This is where I keep my piano and where we watch TV.



I give you a brief description of our house to understand what happened next.  We heard a noise like something falling down.  I ran out of the front room, through the back room past the dining room and into the kitchen.  There used to be a way from the front room directly into the dining room but we made a wall out of bookshelves that now separates the two rooms.

 All that to say that I lost precious seconds getting to the kitchen to find out what the noise was.  I assumed it was Breeya our little geriatric dog who often wanders aimlessly around the house, neither seeing nor hearing nor knowing where she is (sad).

I went through the kitchen to the utility room and out the back door where the motion sensor light was on.  I looked around for Breeya but couldn't find her.  When I returned to the front room, she was there lying under the piano, peacefully sleeping.

That could only mean one thing.

It was the cat!  We have a cat that is sneaking into our house through the doggie door at night.  She is helping herself to Breeya's food dish and pushing things off our kitchen counters for her personal amusement.

I don't know for a fact it is a cat.  It could be a 'possum or a raccoon, but I doubt it.  Either of those animals probably wouldn't be able to tear out of our house with the lightening speed of this animal.  I have not seen it yet.  

But I know you're there, cat, and if you're reading this, know you will be discovered and face the due penalty of your sins.  I'm not sure what that penalty will be, that's between you and God, but know that the wicked do not prosper.

Les Oiseaux  Tristes by Maurice Ravel is playing. The composer is also the performer in this vintage recording. Les Oiseaux Tristes is French for sad birds. I think that this is how my little Hercaloo is feeling because I now have to keep her in the cage when I go out for fear Senor don Gato eats her.



A Dark Night's Work and Other Stories by Elizabeth Gaskell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A Dark Night's Work and Other Stories are a small collection of short stories by the Victorian author Elizabeth Gaskell.

Gaskell was close friends with Charlotte Bronte, or at least as close as anyone could get with a recluse in five years, which was how long they knew each other before Bronte died.

Her work does not come near the power of Bronte's but still deserves a place in British and world literature.

Her work can often be dark and suspenseful as is the first and longest story in this anthology. This affected the way I read the other stories, reading them in fearful suspense, waiting for something dreadful to happen to the protagonists who were so vulnerable.

In A Dark Night's Work, a man does something criminal which is witnessed by his man servant and his daughter. They all agree to cover it up to preserve his tenuous standing in his social circles. They all pay a price however that permanently alters their lives.

The next story, Libbie Marsh's Three Eras, is about a poor homeless girl and her relationship with a crippled, lonely boy who she first sees through her window lying in bed next to the window of the house opposite.

In Six Weeks at Heppenheim a British man touring Germany becomes ill and is bedridden in an inn for several weeks in a small German village. While there he gets to know the inmates of the inn and their inner dramas, finding himself drawn in and finally a participant in their lives.

Cumberland Sheep-Shearers is without much plot and is mainly an observation of farm life during sheep-shearing time, although there is a slight story of romance between a man and woman which is hardly referred to but nevertheless makes a strong social statement, a statement that is prevalent in all Gaskell's stories.

The piece de resistance, however, is the last story. What the Grey Woman lacks in length, it more than makes up for in horror and suspense. A young, inexperienced girl is swept off her feet by a French count who carries her away to his remote and isolated chateau in the Swiss mountains. The terrifying discoveries awaiting her there induce her to finally escape with a loyal maid. What follows is a suspenseful chase scene that kept my stomach in knots to the end.

None of Gaskell's stories can be called profound and certainly don't hold a candle to the great's of the 19th century such as Jane Austin, the Bronte sisters, Trollope, or her good friend Thackery. She can rightly be accused of sentimentality at times approaching the maudlin. In Hollywood, she would be a "B" actor. Incidentally, the BBC has created several fine productions of her novels, my favorite being the Cranford series.

However she ably paints the English landscape in a way that reminds one of a Hudson School painting. Perhaps the others made clearer exposes of human character, but Gaskell showed the complicated social strata that afflicted a class conscious society and that by itself makes her books worth reading.

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