Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (36 page)

“I know what you are going to ask. I suppose this is an instance of a kind of thought-reading. Miss Wilkins called yesterday and told me of a dream her brother had as a child when they lived here, and something did no doubt make me think of that when I was awake last night listening to those horrible owls and those men talking and laughing in the shrubbery (by the way, I wish you would see if they have done any damage, and speak to the police about it).

“And so, I suppose, from my brain it must have got into yours while you were asleep. Curious, no doubt, and I am sorry it gave you such a bad night. You had better be as much in the fresh air as you can today.”

“Oh, it’s all right now. But I think I
will
go over to the Lodge and see if I can get a game with any of them. And you?”

“I have enough to do for this morning; and this afternoon, if I am not interrupted, there is my drawing.”

“To be sure—I want to see that finished very much.”

No damage was discoverable in the shrubbery. Mr. Anstruther surveyed with faint interest the site of the rose garden, where the uprooted post still lay, and the hole it had occupied remained unfilled.

Collins, upon inquiry made, proved to be better, but quite unable to come to his work. He expressed, by the mouth of his wife, a hope that he hadn’t done nothing wrong clearing away them things.

Mrs. Collins added that there was a lot of talking people in Westfield, and the hold ones was the worst: seemed to think everything of them having been in the parish longer than what other people had. But as to what they said no more could then be ascertained than that it had quite upset Collins, and was a lot of nonsense.

Recruited by lunch and a brief period of slumber, Mrs. Anstruther settled herself comfortably upon her sketching chair in the path leading through the shrubbery to the side-gate of the churchyard. Trees and buildings were among her favorite subjects, and here she had good studies of both.

She worked hard, and the drawing was becoming a really pleasant thing to look upon by the time that the wooded hills to the west had shut off the sun. Still she would have persevered, but the light changed rapidly, and it became obvious that the last touches must be added on the morrow.

She rose and turned toward the house, pausing for a time to take delight in the limpid green western sky. Then she passed on between the dark box-bushes, and, at a point just before the path debouched on the lawn, she stopped once again and considered the quiet evening landscape, and made a mental note that that must be the tower of one of the Roothing churches that one caught on the skyline.

Then a bird (perhaps) rustled in the box-bush on her left, and she turned and started at seeing what at first she took to be a Fifth of November mask peeping out among the branches. She looked closer.

It was not a mask. It was a face—large, smooth, and pink. She remembers
the minute drops of perspiration which were starting from its forehead. She remembers how the jaws were clean-shaven and the eyes shut. She remembers also, and with an accuracy which makes the thought intolerable to her, how the mouth was open and a single tooth appeared below the upper lip. As she looked the face receded into the darkness of the bush.

The shelter of the house was gained and the door shut before she collapsed.

Mr. and Mrs. Anstruther had been for a week or more recruiting at Brighton before they received a circular from the Essex Archeological Society, and a query as to whether they possessed certain historical portraits which it was desired to include in the forthcoming work on Essex Portraits, to be published under the Society’s auspices.

There was an accompanying letter from the Secretary which contained the following passage:

We are specially anxious to know whether you possess the original of the engraving of which I enclose a photograph. It represents

Sir——, Lord Chief Justice under Charles II, who, as you doubtless know, retired after his disgrace to Westfield, and is supposed to have died there of remorse.

It may interest you to hear that a curious entry has recently been found in the registers, not of Westfield but of Priors Roothing, to the effect that the parish was so much troubled after his death that the rector of Westfield summoned the parsons of all the Roothings to come lay him; which they did.

The entry ends by saying: “The stake is in a field adjoining to the churchyard of Westfield, on the west side.” Perhaps you can let us know if any tradition to this effect is current in your parish.

The incidents which the “enclosed photograph” recalled were productive of a severe shock to Mrs. Anstruther. It was decided that she must spend the winter abroad.

Mr. Anstruther, when he went down to Westfield to make the necessary arrangements, not unnaturally told his story to the rector (an old gentleman), who showed little surprise.

“Really I had managed to piece out for myself very much what must have happened, partly from old people’s talk and partly from what I saw in your grounds. Of course we have suffered to some extent also.

“Yes, it was bad at first: like owls, as you say, and men talking sometimes. One night it was in this garden, and at other times about several of the cottages. But lately there has been very little. I think it will die out.

“There is nothing in our registers except the entry of the burial, and what I for a long time took to be the family motto. But last time I looked at it I noticed that it was added in a later hand and had the initials of one of our rectors quite late in the 17th century, A.C.—Augustine Crompton.

“Here it is, you see—
quieta non movere
. I suppose—Well, it is rather hard to say exactly what I do suppose.”

T
WO MEN IN A SMOKING-ROOM
were talking of their private-school days.

“At
our
school,” said A., “we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase.”

“What was it like?”

“Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?”

“You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own. There’s a subject for you, by the way—‘The Folklore of Private Schools.’”

“Yes. The crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.”

“Nowadays the
Strand
and
Pearson’s
, and so on, would be extensively drawn upon.”

“No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in
my
time. Let’s see. I wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and had just time to say, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and died.”

“Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?”

“I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the
passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling toward him on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek.

“There was besides, let me think—Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of horseshoes also. I don’t know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the bed-curtains say, ‘Now we’re shut in for the night.’

“None of those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories.”

“Oh, likely enough—with additions from the magazines, as I said. You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not, nobody has that ever I came across.”

“From the way in which you said that, I gather that
you
have.”

“I really don’t know, but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.

“The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and fairly old house—a great white building with very fine grounds about it. There were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any tolerable features.

“I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870. And among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn’t spend time in describing him: the main thing is that I got to know him very well. He was not an exceptional boy in any way—not particularly good at books or games—but he suited me.

“The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required, and there were rather frequent changes among them.

“One term—perhaps it was my third or fourth—a new master made his appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale, black-bearded man. I think we liked him. He had traveled a good deal, and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was some competition among us to get within earshot of him.

“I remember too—dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then—that he had a charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin. There was an effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn practically smooth, and he had had cut on it—rather barbarously—his own initials, G.W.S., and a date, July 24, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he told me he had picked it up in Constantinople. It was about the size of a florin, perhaps rather smaller.

“Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing Latin grammar with us. One of his favorite methods—perhaps it is rather a good one—was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are lots of school stories in which that happens—or anyhow there might be. But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that on with him.

“Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express
remembering
in Latin, and he ordered us each to make a sentence bringing in the verb
memini
, ‘I remember.’

“Well, most of us made up some ordinary sentence such as ‘I remember my father,’ or ‘He remembers his book,’ or something equally uninteresting. And I dare say a good many put down
memino librum meum
, and so forth. But the boy I mentioned—McLeod—was evidently thinking of something more elaborate than that.

“The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who was next to him, poked him and whispered to him to look sharp. But he didn’t seem to attend.

“I looked at his paper and saw he had put down nothing at all. So I jogged him again harder than before and upbraided him sharply for keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect. He started and seemed to wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a couple of lines on his paper, and showed it up with the rest.

“As it was the last, or nearly the last, to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say to the boys who had written
meminiscimus patri meo
and the rest of it, it turned out that the clock struck twelve before he had gotten to McLeod,
and McLeod had to wait afterward to have his sentence corrected.

“There was nothing much going on outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come. He came very slowly when he did arrive, and I guessed there had been some sort of trouble.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you get?’

“‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said McLeod, ‘nothing much. But I think Sampson’s rather sick with me.’

“‘Why, did you show him up some rot?’

“‘No fear,’ he said. ‘It was all right as far as I could see. It was like this:
Memento
—that’s right enough for remember, and it takes a genitive—
memento putei inter quatuor taxos.
’

“‘What silly rot!’ I said. ‘What made you shove that down? What does it mean?’

“‘That’s the funny part,’ said McLeod. ‘I’m not quite sure what it does mean. All I know is, it just came into my head and I corked it down. I know what I
think
it means, because just before I wrote it down I had a sort of picture of it in my head.

“‘I believe it means ‘Remember the well among the four—” What are those dark sort of trees that have red berries on them?’

“‘Mountain ashes, I s’pose you mean.’

“‘I never heard of them,’ said McLeod. ‘No,
I’ll
tell you—yews.’

“‘Well, and what did Sampson say?’

“‘Why, he was jolly odd about it. When he read it he got up and went to the mantelpiece and stopped quite a long time without saying anything, with his back to me. And then he said, without turning around, and rather quiet, ‘What do you suppose that means?’