by M. R. James
“So on I went through the hall and through the audit chamber next to it, which also has big windows, and then into the bedrooms which lead to my own, where the curtains were drawn, and I had to go slower because of steps here and there.
“It was in the second of those rooms that I nearly got my quietus. The moment I opened the door of it I felt there was something wrong.
“I thought twice, I confess, whether I shouldn’t turn back and find another way there is to my room rather than go through that one. Then I was ashamed of myself, and thought what people call better of it, though I don’t know about ‘better’ in this case.
“If I was to describe my experience exactly, I should say this: there was a dry, light, rustling sound all over the room as I went in, and then (you remember it was perfectly dark) something seemed to rush at me, and there was—I don’t know how to put it—a sensation of long thin arms, or legs, or feelers, all about my face, and neck, and body.
“Very little strength in them, there seemed to be, but, Spearman, I don’t think I was ever more horrified or disgusted in all my life, that I remember: and it does take something to put me out.
“I roared out as loud as I could, and flung away my candle at random, and, knowing I was near the window, I tore at the curtain and somehow let in enough light to be able to see something waving which I knew was an insect’s leg, by the shape of it: but, Lord, what a size! Why, the beast must have been as tall as I am.
“And now you tell me sawflies are an inch long or less. What do you make of it, Spearman?”
“For goodness’ sake finish your story first,” I said. “I never heard anything like it.”
“Oh,” said he, “there’s no more to tell. Mary ran in with a light, and there was nothing there. I didn’t tell her what was the matter. I changed my room for last night, and I expect for good.”
“Have you searched this odd room of yours?” I said. “What do you keep in it?”
“We don’t use it,” he answered. “There’s an old press there, and some other furniture.”
“And the press?” said I.
“I don’t know. I never saw it opened, but I do know that it’s locked.”
“Well, I should have it looked into, and, if you had time, I own to having some curiosity the see the palace myself.”
“I didn’t exactly like to ask you, but that’s rather what I hoped you’d say. Name your time and I’ll take you there.”
“No time like the present,” I said at once, for I saw he would never settle down to anything while this affair was in suspense.
He got up with great alacrity, and looked at me, I am tempted to think, with marked approval. “Come along,” was all he said, however, and was pretty silent all the way to his house.
My Mary (as he calls her in public, and I in private) was summoned, and we proceeded to the room.
The Doctor had gone so far as to tell her that he had had something of a fright there last night, of what nature he had not yet divulged. But now he pointed out and described, very briefly, the incidents of his progress.
When we were near the important spot, he pulled up, and allowed me to pass on. “There’s the room,” he said. “Go in, Spearman, and tell us what you find.”
Whatever I might have felt at midnight, noonday I was sure would keep back anything sinister, and I flung the door open with an air and stepped in.
It was a well-lighted room, with its large window on the right, though not, I thought, a very airy one. The principal piece of furniture was the gaunt old press of dark wood. There was, too, a four-post bedstead, a mere skeleton which could hide nothing, and there was a chest of drawers.
On the window-sill and the floor near it were the dead bodies of many hundred sawflies, and one torpid one which I had some satisfaction in killing.
I tried the door of the press, but could not open it. The drawers, too, were locked. Somewhere, I was conscious, there was a faint rustling sound, but I could not locate it, and when I made my report to those outside, I said nothing of it. But, I said, clearly the next thing was to see what was in those locked receptacles.
Uncle Oldys turned to Mary. “Mrs. Maple,” he said, and Mary ran off—no one, I am sure, steps like her—and soon came back at a soberer pace, with an elderly lady of discreet aspect.
“Have you the keys of these things, Mrs. Maple?” said Uncle Oldys. His simple words let loose a torrent (not violent, but copious) of speech. Had she been a shade or two higher in the social scale, Mrs. Maple might have stood as the model for Miss Bates.
“Oh, Doctor, and Miss, and you too, sir,” she said, acknowledging my presence with a bend, “them keys! Who was that again that come when first we took over things in this house—a gentleman in business it was, and I gave him his luncheon in the small parlor on account of us not having everything as we should like to see it in the large one—chicken, and apple-pie, and a glass of madeira—dear, dear, you’ll say I’m running on, Miss Mary; but I only mention it to bring back my recollection. And there it comes—Gardner, just the same as it did last week with the artichokes and the text of the sermon.
“Now that Mr. Gardner, every key I got from him were labeled to itself, and each and every one was a key of some door or another in this house, and sometimes two. And when I say door, my meaning is door of a room, not like such a press as this is. Yes, Miss Mary, I know full well, and I’m just making it clear to your uncle and you too, sir.
“But now there was a box which this same gentleman he give over into my charge, and thinking no harm after he was gone I took the liberty, knowing it was your uncle’s property, to rattle it: and unless I’m most surprisingly deceived, in that box there was keys, but what keys, that, Doctor, is known Elsewhere, for open the box, no that I would not do.”
I wondered that Uncle Oldys remained as quiet as he did under this address. Mary, I knew, was amused by it, and he probably had been taught by experience that it was useless to break in upon it.
At any rate he did not, but merely said at the end, “Have you that box handy, Mrs. Maple? If so, you might bring it here.”
Mrs. Maple pointed her finger at him, either in accusation or in gloomy triumph. “There,” she said, “was I to choose out the very words out of your mouth, Doctor, them would be the ones. And if I’ve took it to my own rebuke one half-a-dozen times, it’s been nearer fifty.
“Laid awake I have in my bed, sat down in my chair I have, the same you and Miss Mary gave me the day I was twenty year in your service, and no person could desire a better—yes, Miss Mary, but it is the truth, and well we know who it is would have it different if he could. ‘All very well,’ says I to myself, ‘but pray, when the Doctor calls you to account for that box, what are you going to say?’
“No, Doctor, if you was some masters I’ve heard of and I was some servants I could name, I should have an easy task before me, but things being, humanly speaking, what they are, the one course open to me is just to say to you that without Miss Mary comes to my room and helps me to my recollection, which her wits may manage what’s slipped beyond mine, no such box as that, small though it be, will cross your eyes thus many a day to come.”
“Why, dear Mrs. Maple, why didn’t you tell me before that you wanted me to help you to find it?” said my Mary. “No, never mind telling me why it was: let us come at once and look for it.”
They hastened off together. I could hear Mrs. Maple beginning an explanation which, I doubt not, lasted into the farthest recesses of the housekeeper’s department. Uncle Oldys and I were left alone.
“A valuable servant,” he said, nodding toward the door. “Nothing goes wrong under her: the speeches are seldom over three minutes.”
“How will Miss Oldys manage to make her remember about the box?” I asked.
“Mary? Oh, she’ll make her sit down and ask her about her aunt’s last illness, or who gave her the china dog on the mantelpiece—something quite off the point. Then, as Maple says, one thing brings up another, and the rig
ht one will come around sooner than you could suppose. There! I believe I hear them coming back already.”
It was indeed so, and Mrs. Maple was hurrying on ahead of Mary with the box in her outstretched hand, and a beaming face. “What was it,” she cried as she drew near, “what was it as I said, before ever I come out of Dorsetshire to this place? Not that I’m a Dorset woman myself, nor had need to be. ‘Safe bind, safe find,’ and there it was in the place where I’d put it—what?—two months back, I dare say.”
She handed it to Uncle Oldys, and he and I examined it with some interest, so that I ceased to pay attention to Mrs. Ann Maple for the moment, though I know that she went on to expound exactly where the box had been, and in what way Mary had helped to refresh her memory on the subject.
It was an oldish box, tied with pink tape and sealed, and on the lid was pasted a label inscribed in old ink, The Senior Prebendary’s House, Whitminster. On being opened it was found to contain two keys of moderate size, and a paper, on which, in the same hand as the label, was Keys of the Press and Box of Drawers standing in the disused Chamber.
Also this: The Effects in this Press and Box are held by me, and to be held by my successors in the Residence, in trust for the noble Family of Kildonan, if claim be made by any survivor of it. I having made all the Inquiry possible to myself am of the opinion that that noble House is wholly extinct: the last Earl having been, as is notorious, cast away at sea, and his only Child and Heire deceas’d in my House (the Papers as to which melancholy Casualty were by me repos’d in the same Press in this year of our Lord 1753, March) 21. I am further of opinion that unless grave discomfort arise, such persons, not being of the Family of Kildonan, as shall become possess’d of these keys, will be well advised to leave matters as they are: which opinion I do not express without weighty and sufficient reason; and am Happy to have my judgment confirm’d by the other Members of this College and Church who are conversant with the Events referr’d to in this Paper.
—Tho. Ashton, S.T.P., Præb. senr. Will. Blake, S.T.P., Decanus. Hen. Goodman, S.T.B., Præb. junr.
“Ah!” said Uncle Oldys, “grave discomfort! So he thought there might be something. I suspect it was that young man,” he went on, pointing with the key to the line about the “only Child and Heire.” “Eh, Mary? The viscounty of Kildonan was Saul.”
“How do you know that, Uncle?” said Mary.
“Oh, why not? It’s all in Debrett—two little fat books. But I meant the tomb by the lime walk. He’s there. What’s the story, I wonder? Do you know it, Mrs. Maple? And, by the way, look at your sawflies by the window there.”
Mrs. Maple, thus confronted with two subjects at once, was a little put to it to do justice to both. It was no doubt rash in Uncle Oldys to give her the opportunity. I could only guess that he had some slight hesitation about using the key he held in his hand.
“Oh them flies, how bad they was, Doctor and Miss, this three or four days. And you, too, sir, you wouldn’t guess, none of you! And how they come, too!
“First we took the room in hand, the shutters was up, and had been, I dare say, years upon years, and not a fly to be seen. Then we got the shutter bars down with a deal of trouble and left it so for the day, and next day I sent Susan in with the broom to sweep about, and not two minutes hadn’t passed when out she come into the hall like a blind thing, and we had regular to beat them off her. Why, her cap and her hair, you couldn’t see the color of it, I do assure you, and all clustering around her eyes, too.
“Fortunate enough she’s not a girl with fancies, else if it had been me, why only the tickling of the nasty things would have drove me out of my wits. And now there they lay like so many dead things. Well, they was lively enough on the Monday, and now here’s Thursday; is it, or no, Friday. Only to come near the door and you’d hear them pattering up against it, and once you opened it, dash at you, they would, as if they’d eat you.
“I couldn’t help thinking to myself, ‘If you was bats, where should we be this night?’ Nor you can’t cresh ’em, not like a usual kind of a fly. Well, there’s something to be thankful for, if we could but learn by it.
“And then this tomb, too,” she said, hastening on to her second point to elude any chance of interruption, “of them two poor young lads. I say poor, and yet when I recollect myself, I was at tea with Mrs. Simpkins, the sexton’s wife, before you come, Doctor and Miss Mary, and that’s a family has been in the place, what? I dare say a hundred years in that very house, and could put their hand on any tomb or yet grave in all the yard and give you name and age.
“And his account of that young man, Mr. Simpkins, I mean to say—well!” She compressed her lips and nodded several times.
“Tell us, Mrs. Maple,” said Mary.
“Go on,” said Uncle Oldys. “What about him?” said I.
“Never was such a thing seen in this place, not since Queen Mary’s times and the Pope and all,” said Mrs. Maple. “Why, do you know he lived in this very house, him and them that was with him, and for all I can tell in this identical room” (she shifted her feet uneasily on the floor).
“Who was with him? Do you mean the people of the house?” said Uncle Oldys suspiciously.
“Not to call people, Doctor, dear no,” was the answer. “More what he brought with him from Ireland, I believe it was. No, the people in the house was the last to hear anything of his goings-on. But in the town not a family but knew how he stopped out at night: and them that was with him, why, they were such as would strip the skin from the child in its grave. And a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost, says Mr. Simpkins.
“But they turned on him at the last, he says, and there’s the mark still to be seen on the minster door where they run him down. And that’s no more than the truth, for I got him to show it to myself, and that’s what he said. A lord he was, with a Bible name of a wicked king, whatever his godfathers could have been thinking of.”
“Saul was the name,” said Uncle Oldys.
“To be sure it was Saul, Doctor, and thank you. And now isn’t it King Saul that we read of raising up the dead ghost that was slumbering in its tomb till he disturbed it, and isn’t that a strange thing, this young lord to have such a name, and Mr. Simpkins’ grandfather to see him out of his window of a dark night going about from one grave to another in the yard with a candle, and them that was with him following through the grass at his heels.
“And one night him to come right up to old Mr. Simpkins’ window that gives on the yard and press his face up against it to find out if there was anyone in the room that could see him. And only just time there was for old Mr. Simpkins to drop down like, quiet, just under the window and hold his breath, and not stir till he heard him stepping away again, and this rustling-like in the grass after him as he went, and then when he looked out of his window in the morning there was treadings in the grass and a dead man’s bone.
“Oh, he was a cruel child for certain, but he had to pay in the end, and after.”
“After?” said Uncle Oldys, with a frown.
“Oh yes, Doctor, night after night in old Mr. Simpkins’ time, and his son, that’s our Mr. Simpkins’ father, yes, and our own Mr. Simpkins too. Up against that same window, particular when they’ve had a fire of a chilly evening, with his face right on the panes, and his hands fluttering out, and his mouth open and shut, open and shut, for a minute or more, and then gone off in the dark yard.
“But open the window at such times, no, that they dare not do, though they could find it in their heart to pity the poor thing, that pinched up with the cold, and seemingly fading away to a nothink as the years passed on. Well, indeed, I believe it is no more than the truth what our Mr. Simpkins says on his own grandfather’s word, ‘A withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost.’”
“I dare say,” said Uncle Oldys suddenly—so suddenly that Mrs. Maple stopped short. “Thank you. Come away, all of you.”
“Why, Uncle,” said Mary, “are you not going to open the press after all?”
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Uncle Oldys blushed, actually blushed. “My dear,” he said, “you are at liberty to call me a coward, or applaud me as a prudent man, whichever you please. But I am neither going to open that press nor that chest of drawers myself, nor am I going to hand over the keys to you or to any other person.
“Mrs. Maple, will you kindly see about getting a man or two to move those pieces of furniture into the garret?”
“And when they do it, Mrs. Maple,” said Mary, who seemed to me—I did not then know why—more relieved than disappointed by her uncle’s decision, “I have something that I want put with the rest; only quite a small packet.”
We left that curious room not unwillingly, I think. Uncle Oldys’s orders were carried out that same day.
“And so,” [concludes Mr. Spearman] “Whitminster has a Bluebeard’s chamber, and, I am rather inclined to suspect, a Jack-in-the-box, awaiting some future occupant of the residence of the senior prebendary.”
Two Doctors
IT IS A VERY COMMON THING, in my experience, to find papers shut up in old books; but one of the rarest things to come across any such that are at all interesting. Still it does happen, and one should never destroy them unlooked at.
Now it was a practice of mine before the war occasionally to buy old ledgers of which the paper was good, and which possessed a good many blank leaves, and to extract these and use them for my own notes and writings. One such I purchased for a small sum in 1911.
It was tightly clasped, and its boards were warped by having for years been obliged to embrace a number of extraneous sheets. Three-quarters of this inserted matter had lost all vestige of importance for any living human being: one bundle had not. That it belonged to a lawyer is certain, for it is endorsed: The strangest case I have yet met, and bears initials, and an address in Gray’s Inn. It is only materials for a case, and consists of statements by possible witnesses. The man who would have been the defendant or prisoner seems never to have appeared.
