The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “The Boches in our village are indiscreet,” she answered. “They think we poor peasants are too simple to understand them, especially when they speak their own language. This is the headquarters of an army corps, and little goes on here that is unknown to us. Also, we have means of communicating with our friends.”

  “I thank you a thousand times, Mademoiselle,” I answered. “Now I must be getting on.”

  But I stopped, frozen with horror, for at that moment I heard the tramp of feet, a sharp, guttural command—and then I saw a whole company of German soldiers emerge from the forest and move along the road in marching order.

  I made a quick movement toward the plane. My first impulse was to try to start it before the column was upon us, though I knew beforehand the futility of such an attempt.

  But the girl restrained me. Laying a gentle hand upon my arm, she seemed to arrest all my powers of movement.

  Paralyzed with fear for my beloved country, I could only stand there beside her, watching those men in the hated uniform moving, moving toward us. The road ran close beside the hedge of furze, and it was not so dark but that they were bound to see us, when they turned their eyes in our direction.

  Tramp, tramp! At least we might have lain down, grovelled on the earth, hoping thus to escape notice. But the girl stood proudly erect, her sensitive nostrils dilating with scorn as she watched the invaders. And, even though the paralysis that had momentarily gripped my muscles had passed away—even though everything was at stake—I could not crouch.

  I, a French soldier, could not grovel on the ground to escape the notice of those arrogant invaders, marching, marching on, their feet making heavy contact with the earth, the metal parts of their equipment clanking as they moved. And so I waited for death, too proud to hide or run.

  The Germans were only a few feet away, on the opposite side of the hedge, and still we two stood there. The girl’s hands were clenched, and her face now bore a look of inspired scorn, almost as if she had been some ancient prophetess.

  Then from the trees appeared the form of an officer on horseback. He took up his position in advance of the column, on the side nearer to us—so near that scarcely six feet separated us from him. I gripped my pistol, and, as I did so, my companion turned her face and looked at me. She smiled and shook her head ever so little.

  The officer was abreast of us—merciful heaven, he was almost near enough to touch the girl!

  Then the man turned his face, and I saw his eyes meet my companion’s.

  He did not see her!

  I saw him shiver and glare wildly about him, as his horse reared and snorted. He shouted and brought his whip down heavily upon the animal’s shoulders. It broke into a mad gallop, and so man and horse passed us, the man pulling at the reins and swearing, and the horse a-quiver, as if terrified by something more than the lash.

  Tramp, tramp! The company was passing us. It was passing out of sight along the road. I looked at my companion. That gentle smile was on her lips again, and her eyes were raised to heaven.

  Then, for the first time, a feeling of superstitious awe overcame me. Sceptic though I was, I wondered whether the girl had not invoked some divine power that had protected us.

  I trembled. The reaction from our imminent danger almost unnerved me. I had feared for my companion, no less than for myself. I knew that, had she been discovered, she would have been shot, along with probably half her village.

  She laid her hand upon my shoulder, and its caressing touch seemed to calm me.

  “Yes, you must go, soldier of France,” she said. “But before you go, let us pray, here in the shadow of that great church yonder. It is a famous shrine, where many miraculous things have happened. Will you join your prayers with mine, for France?”

  Looking into her clear eyes, I could not lie to her.

  “Mademoiselle,” I stammered, “I must tell you—I am an unbeliever. That will shock you terribly——”

  “No, Monsieur, it does not shock me at all,” she answered, though there was a wistful look on her face. “I know that many men, and women too, no longer believe. But Our Lord does not despise those who stumble helplessly in the darkness. One day He will bring them all to Himself. And——” Here her voice rang out like a silver flute, with astonishing force and rhythm, “He will work wonderful things for our beloved France. The invader shall be hurled back and brought low in the dust!

  “Pray with me, soldier,” she said softly.

  I knelt beside her on the damp meadow, and repeated the words that came from her lips. Simple and eloquent they were. A prayer that God would show His mercies to our beloved country, that right should triumph, that the dreadful flow of blood should cease as soon as His wrath was satisfied.…

  And then she prayed for me—prayed that I might come safe through all the perils of the war, and that I should be led to acknowledge Him as the author of my being, and my salvation.

  I confess my eyes were wet when we stood up. Something was stirring in me. I, who had hitherto scoffed at things spiritual, felt that a gate had been opened in me somewhere, that I was stumbling out of darkness into sunshine.

  “Now, soldier!” said the girl.

  I took her hands in mine.

  “Mademoiselle, will you not tell me your name,” I asked, “so that, after the war is ended, I may find you again and thank you for your heroism? I shall mention it to General Joffre. Your name, please, and that of this village?”

  That tremulous, faint smile played about her lips again.

  “Monsieur, the praise of men means little,” she answered. “You will know me some day. But not—now. It is better that I should not answer your questions. Farewell, Monsieur.”

  Her hands hovered above my head like a benediction. Then, with a new strength, as though my wounds did not exist, I leaped into the cockpit. The girl’s white fingers touched the propeller and the engine started with a roar. The next instant she was no longer there.

  Dark though it had grown, I still could not believe that she had run from me. I should have seen her go.… No, she had vanished utterly.

  I knew then—yes, I knew that she had been a spirit of good, sent by the Heavenly Powers to help a poor, wounded soldier, and to save France. All my scepticism fell from me. I uttered a silent prayer, asking forgiveness for my past doubts.

  In a minute or two I opened the throttle wide enough to send the wheels over the furrows that acted as chocks. I taxied the length of the field, and took the air just as two German sentries came running out of the wood, shouting hoarse challenges.

  I shouted back above the roaring motor, heard the snap of their rifles and felt a bullet fan my face. Then I was soaring high above the tree-tops and winging my way toward Vitry.

  Late that night I descended at the headquarters of General Joffre. I had flown unmolested over regions infested by the invaders. I had seen squadrons of hostile planes aloft, but they must have thought it impossible that I could be an enemy, so far from my own base, for they had paid no attention to me.

  I had flown high above belching cannon, over battlefields where Boche and Frenchman still contested in bitter frenzy. And so, at last, I had dropped miraculously at Villerons-sur-Yser.

  Miraculously, I say, for, flying in the night, I had had nothing to guide me except the consciousness that I was not alone. Yes, even up there in the air I had had the sense of guidance.

  Some unknown power seemed to direct my flight and a few minutes after I landed, I was standing in the presence of Joffre. He took my dispatches and read them.

  His self-command was superb, for it would have been impossible for any Frenchman to have read those dispatches unmoved. They told him of a peril he had not suspected, and of the destruction of a part of his army; but they showed him the way to that concentration that was to save France at the Battle of the Marne.

  He held an anxious discussion with his staff, seeming to have forgotten me. Unheeded, I stood there while messages were sent over the telephone, and motor
cyclists went thundering off through the night. The feeling of strength that had sustained me had disappeared, now that my task was done, and I was feeling desperately weak.

  Suddenly I grew aware that Joffre was speaking to me, and with an effort I stood upright at attention.

  “You have been wounded, Captain Roget? You must go to the hospital and receive attention at once. Your deed shall not be forgotten.”

  That was almost the last thing that I remembered. I must have collapsed, for I was only dimly conscious of being placed in an ambulance, of jolting mile after mile that night, and the next day, and the next night.

  But afterward, when I opened my eyes to full consciousness again, to find myself a cripple (Philippe touched his empty sleeve), it was to receive the news of the glorious victory of the Marne.

  My delivery of those dispatches had saved France, and I was not forgotten, as Joffre had promised.

  But I could not accept praise for myself alone. I wanted to render homage to my protector, whether spirit or human. And that, strangely enough, was the most difficult thing in the world to do.

  You see, all this time I had been wavering between two convictions. However sure I had been of the girl’s actual presence, I could not help believing at times that I must have been the victim of an hallucination due to my wounds. Nevertheless, I was convinced that the girl’s existence had not been a dream. I had seen her beyond doubt.

  But to tell the highly sceptical French officers that I had been saved by a spirit would have been simply to invite ridicule. And, if the girl had been human, I did not know her name, nor the name of her village.

  In time I became friendly with old Colonel Chabot, the commander of the hospital. To him I spoke of the affair, and of my perplexities. He was a sincerely religious man, graver than the ordinary type of soldier, and he heard my story in sympathetic silence.

  “Never mind the girl for the moment, my dear Roget,” he said finally. “This village—can you not describe it?”

  “Impossible,” I answered. “You see, it was dark, and it was hidden from me by the belt of trees. All I saw was the church.”

  “Ah, yes, the church! Can you describe this church, then?”

  I had thought that I had taken little enough notice of the church, but now, of a sudden, the whole appearance of it came back into my mind. I described it to him in detail; it was almost as if I was being prompted in what I said.

  Chabot interrupted me to ask numerous questions, growing more and more excited the while. Suddenly he clapped me on the shoulder.

  “Enough, my boy, enough!” he exclaimed. “Tell that to your priest—tell it to those who have the wit to understand, but do not tell it to the Government—not now!”

  “But—but—what do you mean?” I stammered.

  “I mean——” Coolly and quietly old Chabot explained the miracle.

  That was the story that I gleaned from my erstwhile war comrade, Captain Philippe Roget, at the little café opposite the statue in the square in Rouen. But what Chabot had told him he did not explain to me.

  “I shall show you in a few moments, my dear Sewell,” said Philippe. “Come, let us settle our bill, for it is growing late, and, as I told you, I have an appointment with a lady.”

  “And I am willing to hazard,” I answered, “that the lady is the girl who saved you from the Boches in that unknown village. I’ll wager she turned out to be no spirit, but a girl of flesh and blood, who slipped away from you in the darkness, once her mission was done.

  “And further,” I added, warming up to my theme, and feeling the romance of it, “she was probably a lady of gentle breeding, who had somehow become entrapped in this village of the Vosges, and, fearing to disclose her rank to the Germans, had lived there when they occupied the town, in the guise of a peasant, helping her country in that way.”

  Philippe Roget smiled, an enigmatical smile that conveyed the impression that I was very wide of the mark. We settled the bill, and then he turned to me.

  “Would you like to meet this lady of mine?” he asked, taking up his roses.

  “With all my heart,” I answered. “I am sure she is in every way worthy of the homage you have paid her. And I hope that the day is not far distant when your loyalty will be rewarded.”

  “You are very dense, my dear Sewell,” was all that Philippe answered.

  With the roses in his right hand, he motioned me to join him, and together we walked forth into the softness of the May evening. The old houses about the square loomed up picturesquely in the twilight. I was thinking of the many famous persons who had lived in Rouen, of the stirring part the quaint town had played in history. The very air about us seemed astir with romance.…

  The square was nearly empty, but there were a few persons passing to and fro, and clustered around the statue there was a little group of people, some of whom were kneeling. A woman in the garb of mourning, her hands clasped, was praying aloud in a quavering voice, while the tears streamed down her cheeks.

  As we drew nearer, I saw a young girl approach, make a genuflexion, and lay a handful of wild flowers at the feet of the sculptured figure.

  Then I saw that the statue was wreathed with roses, lilies, hothouse flowers, and that its base was heaped with floral offerings.

  Captain Philippe Roget took off his hat, and mechanically I did the same. Then, to my astonishment—for I had not yet guessed what his purpose was—he fell upon his knees, and reverently placed the spray of roses upon the base of the statue. His lips moved in prayer.

  I stood there, watching him, and of a sudden the truth dawned upon me with almost blinding clarity. I watched in amazement, and I looked up at the noble face of the young girl chiselled in stone. I knew. Philippe Roget rose to his feet.

  “That village I spoke of,” he said, “was named Domrémy.”

  And this was May 30th—the day on which the English had burned Joan of Domrémy as a sorceress, on this very site—the Rouen marketplace—almost five hundred years before.

  “You understand?” whispered Philippe to me.

  “I understand,” I answered in a low voice.

  “They call her the Guide of France,” he said quietly. “I believe that it was she who came to me in the hour of my country’s gravest peril, to save France through me—and to save my soul.”

  And to that I was silent.

  THE SHELL OF SENSE

  Olivia

  Howard Dunbar

  OF THE MANY CAUSES of which Olivia Howard Dunbar (1873–1953) became an advocate, most were of a liberal bent, notably her support of women’s suffrage, her benign attitude toward lesbianism and single-sex couples embracing motherhood, and, along with her husband, Ridgeley Torrence, the poetry editor of The New Republic, her involvement with black rights. She was also a powerful voice for ghost stories, especially those written by women.

  Born in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, she received a B.A. from Smith College and moved to New York City in 1896 to become an editor at the New York World. She resigned six years later to become a prolific freelance writer of short stories and articles for such publications as Lippincott’s, Harper’s, The Century, Scribner’s, and other leading periodicals of the day. She married Torrence in 1914 and the couple became popular and influential members of the literary community of the city. Dunbar’s attitude toward ghost stories, outlined in a piece she wrote for The Dial in 1905 calling for a renaissance of the genre, was that they should deviate from the M. R. James school of slowly unfolding tales of old scholars and antiquarians in dark churches and libraries and instead involve women and children in more naturalistic literature. Among her most enduring works are “The Long Chamber,” in which a clearly superior woman subjugates herself to her husband, “The Dream-Baby,” which tacitly accepts a lesbian couple, and “The Sycamore,” in which a young woman lives mainly to support her husband’s career.

  “The Shell of Sense” was originally published in the December 1908 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

  T
he Shell of Sense

  OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR

  IT WAS INTOLERABLY UNCHANGED, the dim, dark-toned room. In an agony of recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfortable, familiar things that my earthly life had been passed among. Incredibly distant from it all as I essentially was, I noted sharply that the very gaps that I myself had left in my bookshelves still stood unfilled; that the delicate fingers of the ferns that I had tended were still stretched futilely toward the light; that the soft agreeable chuckle of my own little clock, like some elderly woman with whom conversation has become automatic, was undiminished.

  Unchanged—or so it seemed at first. But there were certain trivial differences that shortly smote me. The windows were closed too tightly; for I had always kept the house very cool, although I had known that Theresa preferred warm rooms. And my work-basket was in disorder; it was preposterous that so small a thing should hurt me so. Then, for this was my first experience of the shadow-folded transition, the odd alteration of my emotions bewildered me. For at one moment the place seemed so humanly familiar, so distinctly my own proper envelope, that for love of it I could have laid my cheek against the wall; while in the next I was miserably conscious of strange new shrillnesses. How could they be endured—and had I ever endured them?—those harsh influences that I now perceived at the window; light and color so blinding that they obscured the form of the wind, tumult so discordant that one could scarcely hear the roses open in the garden below?

  But Theresa did not seem to mind any of these things. Disorder, it is true, the dear child had never minded. She was sitting all this time at my desk—at my desk—occupied, I could only too easily surmise how. In the light of my own habits of precision it was plain that that sombre correspondence should have been attended to before; but I believe that I did not really reproach Theresa, for I knew that her notes, when she did write them, were perhaps less perfunctory than mine. She finished the last one as I watched her, and added it to the heap of black-bordered envelopes that lay on the desk. Poor girl! I saw now that they had cost her tears. Yet, living beside her day after day, year after year, I had never discovered what deep tenderness my sister possessed. Toward each other it had been our habit to display only a temperate affection, and I remember having always thought it distinctly fortunate for Theresa, since she was denied my happiness, that she could live so easily and pleasantly without emotions of the devastating sort.… And now, for the first time, I was really to behold her.… Could it be Theresa, after all, this tangle of subdued turbulences? Let no one suppose that it is an easy thing to bear, the relentlessly lucid understanding that I then first exercised; or that, in its first enfranchisement, the timid vision does not yearn for its old screens and mists.