The Striding Place: a familiar hand is enough

A hand is enough to change the kind of story being told. At first, Weigall approaches the Yorkshire river with a cultivated taste for atmosphere. He thinks about ghosts, scenery, and his missing friend's opinions. When fingers appear above the water, a human emergency cuts through the mood. The Striding Place becomes frightening because Atherton makes him care more urgently, not because she lets him retreat into elegant detachment.

Weigall's close friend Wyatt Gifford disappeared two nights earlier. Searchers have found no useful trace. Weigall suspects an elaborate practical joke, but his affection keeps him from resting. The contradiction is already interesting: he wants the disappearance to belong to a familiar pattern, while his decision to walk alone shows how little reassurance that pattern supplies.

The spectator has to use his hands

The opening has a pointed little joke about leisure. Weigall is bored by grouse-shooting in which workers drive birds towards waiting guns. Adventure arrives conveniently arranged for him, and he finds the arrangement disappointing. At the river, the division of labour changes. He must tear off a branch, brace himself on slippery stone, and pull. The danger makes him physically useful in a way the afternoon's sport did not.

Atherton draws the struggle in increments. Something white moves against the water's direction. Fingers become legible against dark rock. The branch gives the desperate hand something to grip. Only after that contact do distinctive cufflinks and familiar fingers make recognition possible. The person in peril acquires an identity through a few small details, while most of the body remains obscured.

That is a strong piece of visual construction. The story spends its clearest attention on an extremity rather than offering an immediately readable portrait. A hand can perform need before a face confirms identity. Weigall's effort grows more reckless once he believes he knows whose hand it is. The description makes recognition an action with consequences, rather than a satisfying answer to a puzzle.

Affection is more convincing than the theory

An earlier conversation supplies a competing way to think about bodies. Gifford proposes that a soul might remain with its physical partner after death. The friends discuss the idea as an intriguing possibility, even an experiment. It is their speculation, expressed through period assumptions about mind and spirit; the story does not turn it into medical knowledge or an established account of consciousness.

The rescue gives that abstract conversation an emotional cost. Weigall recalls travel, danger, art, and pleasures shared with Gifford. His attachment becomes specific just as the physical situation becomes harder to assess. The story's intimacy is its best argument for reading it: whatever one makes of the metaphysics, this particular person matters enormously to another particular person.

The limitation is the weight put on a compact final shock. Readers wanting the supernatural mechanism fully worked out may find the earlier conversation an invitation that never becomes a complete explanation. The period language around mental illness is also harsh; the friends' judgments about a former companion deserve distance rather than uncritical repetition. The force of the rescue does not require accepting those judgments.

The ending is best encountered without a preview of its image. What the preceding pages earn is a difficult question about how much visible evidence can promise. Our Horla review follows everyday details that become uncertain evidence; The Willows lets a river landscape overwhelm human assumptions. Atherton brings that uncertainty closer. For a few urgent moments, one familiar hand seems to tell Weigall everything he needs to know.

Questions from the crypt

Sources & further reading

• Gertrude Atherton: The Striding Place, complete original English text in The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories, 1905, Project Gutenberg
• Library of America: authorized The Striding Place reading PDF, publication note identifying The Twins, 1896 and collection 1905

Keep reading

• the horla 1887 maupassant review
• the willows review