Mr. Jones

Lady Jane Lynke inherited Bells, a beautiful old house, which belonged to the Lynkes of Thudeney for nearly six hundred years. Lady Jane Lynke is a woman who had lived an independent, active and decided life. She had left her home when she was young and moved to London. She traveled to many tropical lands and also spent summers studying in Italy and Spain. Now that Bells was hers, she decided to take a trip there on her own. She had never seen Bells before, but when she saw it she was greatly impressed by its beauty that she called out “I shall never leave it!” And her heart swells “as if she had taken the vow to a lover” (p. 595). When she reaches the door of the deep-buttressed chapel, which was ajar, she assumes that this is a good sign and that her forebears have been awaiting for arrival. After visiting the chapel, she proceeds to the door of her new home and suddenly feels uncomfortable and wishes she had brought someone with her. Nevertheless, she rings the doorbell. Lady Jane compares Bells to places she has been before, and Bells feels different to her, not as easy and accessible. Although she has the feeling that someone is watching her from the inside of the house, no one comes to open the door. So she searches for another entrance and rings at the doorbell where Service is written. Again she has the feeling that someone is watching her, it takes a while and then finally a “youngish, unhealthy, respectable and frightened” woman opens the door (p. 596). Lady Jane does not tell her that she inherited Bells but instead asks if she can visit the house. The answer is “the house isn’t shown” (p. 596). Lady Jane tells her that she knows some of the family members. The woman asks her if she is related and Lady Jane replies that she is distantly. The woman sticks to her response that Lady Jane cannot visit the house, not without asking permission. Lady Jane tells her to ask and after a long wait, she returns and tells Lady Jane “Mr. Jones says that no one is allowed to visit the house” (p. 597).

That night Lady Jane tells her friends about what happened at Bells and when they ask her why she did no insist she tells them that she was afraid. Then Edward Stramer, a friend of her family, notes that thirty years ago he had gone to Bells and he had been given the same exact answer “Mr. Jones said no one is allowed to visit the house” (p. 597), which he thinks is very odd. Her friends see Mr. Jones as a “good watch dog” (p. 598) and change the topic of the conversation. But Edward Stramer comes to Jane and says again that it is weird that he received the same response.

The inside of Bells is different from its outside, “not nearly as large as it looked”, “it was very narrow” “and much space wasted in crooked passages and superfluous stairs”. For Jane it feels like “a relief to find the place is less important than she had feared” (p. 598). She could live there comfortably. Lady Jane decides to stick just with the housekeepers of Bells, Mrs. Clemm and Georgiana her niece, who Lady Jane already knew from her first visit. During the first conversation with Mrs. Clemm, Lady Jane asks who Mr. Jones is, Mrs. Clemm’s answer is “he’s more dead than living” (p. 600), Lady Jane feels sorry but repeats her question and asks once again who he is. Mrs. Clemm answer is “he’s my great-uncle” (p. 600), so Lady Jane says “he must have reached a great age” (p. 600). Lady Jane is still curious so she keeps asking questions about him like “what exactly are his duties” (p. 601). Mrs. Clemm lists a lot of things and then she comes to the conclusion that it is difficult to say, when someone has stayed so many years in a house. Lady Jane asks Mrs. Clemm to see Mr. Jones, but Mrs. Clemm rejects this and explains that he is between life and death and that “for what he is: he’s in no state for you to see him” (p. 601).

A few days later Lady Jane invites her friends to Bells to have tea. There Stramer again asks her about Mr. Jones. Lady Jane answers “Mr. Jones is my invisible guardian; or rather guardian of Bells” (p. 602). They are surprised about her not seeing him. Jane only explains that she has not seen him and perhaps she will never see him, because he is very ill. Afterwards, they inspected the house and take a look at the blue parlour room which they regard as the perfect and warmest room for the wintertime. Lady Jane tells the others that she has been told that the chimney smokes hopelessly. Her friends tell her that this is nonsense. Stramer asks what Mr. Jones says about using the room and is told, “no one has ever been able to use this room” (p. 603). Her friends regard this as absurd. Instead they come up with the idea that the housekeepers and Mr. Jones might use this room in their spare time. They continue with their inspection of the house. As one of the women had forgotten her bag in the blue parlour room Lady Jane and Stramer go there, the room is lighten a bit from the outside. Lady Jane feels that someone is in the room but she does not see him at first, but then she sees “an old man with bent shoulders” (p. 603). She takes the bag and they leave the room but it seems that Stramer did not see anything and she says goodbye to her guests. A few days pass and she does not feel comfortable in the “too mysterious, too much withdrawn into its own secret past” house (p. 604).

So decides to invite Stramer who was finished writing his novel. After her friend Stramer arrives, Lady Jane wants to be with him at the blue parlour room. Mrs. Clemm tries to convince her to not go to the room, because of the smoking chimney but Lady Jane still wants to go there. Lady Jane tells Stramer about the muniment-room and she tells him that the key is lost and that, according to Mrs. Clemm there is no locksmith to unlock the door. Stramer finds that awkward “in Mrs. Clemm’s hands keys get lost, chimneys smoke, locksmiths die…” (p. 607). The next day Lady Jane had searched for a locksmith in a town nearby and she finds a locksmith apprentice. Meanwhile Stramer has tried to find answers about Mr. Jones while talking to a man who is responsible for raking leaves, but he had never seen Mr. Jones either. Mrs. Clemm interrupts the conversation between Lady Jane and Stramer announcing that the butcher’s boy gave the locksmith a lift and that he forgot his tools. At lunch Lady Jane and Stramer discuss how strange the situation is becoming, Lady Jane decides to break in the door, but when Georgiana overhears this, she drops the dishes she is carrying.

A bit later, Mrs. Clemm announces that the key was found and her hand trembles like Georgiana’s had earlier. A few hours later, Stramer tells Lady Jane that there is a gap in the papers from 1800 to 1840. He concludes was someone was there before them and then they discover the big footprints on the floor. They believe that Mrs. Clemm had sent someone: Mr. Jones. While walking down she noticed the footprints again and follows them to the blue parlour room. There he was sitting at the desk - Mr. Jones. Mrs. Clemm came by and asked if she had called her, when Lady Jane looks again to the desk, there is no one anymore. Lady Jane looks if there is another door in the room but there is none so she wonders how he had left the room. Lady Jane goes back to the desk and wants to look through the papers but Mrs. Clemm does not wants her to do that, because those are the private papers of Mr. Jones. So Lady Jane asks her if the man she just had seen was Mr. Jones. Mrs. Clemm is confused and asks “you saw him?” (p. 611). Lady Jane took the papers and went to meet Stramer. Those where all the missing papers. The letters were addressed to a Mr. Jones or are about one but they were from 1826. Stramer and Jane find this fact very strange while Jane thinks it could be the ancestor of Mr. Jones. Stramer thinks about the possibility that they are the same one and that Mr. Jones is not alive now. Their conversation is interrupted by Georgiana who says that her aunt is not answering her. Lady Jane is irritated and asks what her aunt should answer and Georgiana responds if she is alive. They go to the bedroom of Mrs. Clemm, she was dead “unspeakable horror in her wide open eyes” (p. 615). Stramer notices “the red marks the marks of recent bruises on her throat” (p. 615) he whispers to Jane that she has been strangled. Stramer asks Georgiana twice were Mr. Jones is, as she doesn’t answer. Lady Jane asks here the same question once more. Georgiana’s answer is “you won’t find him anywhere” “Because he’s not here” (p. 615). Stramer keeps asking where he is and then Georgiana finally answers “He’s in his grave in the church-yard—these years and years he is.” “My aunt hadn’t seen him herself, not since she was a tiny child […]” “That’s the terror of it […] that’s why she always had to do what he told her to […] because you couldn’t answer him back […]” Georgiana says that Mrs. Clemm was punished because of the papers. “Then flinging her arms above her head, Georgiana straightened herself to her full heigt before falling in a swoon at Stramer’s feet” (p. 615) [1].

Sources, Research articles and further reading:

Hanske, Paul-Philipp, Werner, Christian (2018), Die Blüten der Stadt: Ein Wegweiser durch die urbane Pflanzenwelt, Suhrkamp Verlag AG, Berlin.

Hofmann, Helga (2012): Bäume und Sträucher. Die wichtigsten Arten entdecken und bestimmen. Gräfe Und Unzer Verlag, München.

John Cherry (1997): Fabeltiere: Von Drachen, Einhörnern und anderen mythischen Wesen. Reclam Verlag, Stuttgart.

Kimmel, Adolf; Uterwedde, Henrik (2005): Länderbericht Frankreich - Geschichte, Politik, Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft. Medienhaus Froitzheim AG, Bonn.

Lehmkuhl, Ursula (2018): Länderbericht Kanada, Druck- und Verlagshaus. Zarbock GmbH & Co. KG, Frankfurt am Main.

Lewis, Richard Warrington Baldwin (1968): The Collected Short Stories of Edith Wharton – Volume 2. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York p.594-616.

Rörig, Karoline; Glassmann, Ulrich; Köppl, Stefan (2012): Länderbericht Italien. CPI books GmbH, Leck.

Werz, Nikolaus; Gratius, Susanne (2017): Spanien – Analyse Politischer Systeme; Wochenschau Verlag Dr. Kurt Debus GmbH, Schwalbach.

White, John Talbot (1977): The South-East, down and weald: Kent, Surrey and Sussex. Methuen.

Image(s) used:

Archiv des Familienverbandes der Grafen von Pfeil und Klein-Ellguth, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23581413