Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James

by M. R. James

  I cannot help connecting these events I have set down with that entry in the Protocollum book, which states that two gentlemen, being Fellows of the College, were permitted to register a solemn abjuration of all unlawful acts in the practicing of which they had grievously transgressed: and that it was agreed that the Provost and Seniors shall exercise their utmost discretion to the end that this matter be kept strictly private to the Seniority.

  John Humphreys

  A YOUNG MAN is leaning over a gate that leads into a wood. The wood is on the top of a ridge. The man’s back is turned to it, and he is looking at a wide and lovely view. The slope before him is fairly steep, and from its base spreads out a broad vale—perhaps the Vale Royal of England, perhaps another, for I must not be too precise in my indications. When I have said that my hero is gazing at a September sunset over an English river-valley, I have said nearly all that I am competent to put into words: my readers must fill in for themselves the details of the distant layers of moorland glorified in a golden mist, of smoke rising from unseen villages and great houses, and of a pinnacled tower here and there. And now that the scene is set, however sketchily, let the historic present be dropped.

  The spectator did not soon tire of the view: few people would. But at length the sun sank in a limpid sky behind the wooded hills in the west, and he remembered that duty called him home. He scaled the gate and took his way down by a path through ancient pastures. He walked quickly, with his eyes for the most part of the time fixed on the ground before him and casting only an occasional glance ahead. A man or woman coming in his direction some two fields off was the only thing that diversified the familiar scene. Familiar it was, for he had been brought up in the manor house a mile or so away; a house which one or two unexpected deaths had thrown, with the surrounding estate, into his possession only a few months before. I do not think it necessary to set forth the genealogy nor to detail the accidents which had made him what he was: but briefly the situation was this, that John Humphreys, an orphan and an only child, age twenty-two, having just taken a very good degree at Cambridge, and intending to compete for a post in the Home Civil Service, was now a considerable landowner in a beautiful English county, and might expect to figure very respectably in the next issue of Burke’s Landed Gentry.

  He was not the athletic young giant of sixteen stone dear to some writers, nor the spectacled aesthete disliked by the majority: imagine him attractive, clever above the average, neither hating the conventionalities nor a slave to them, [anxious to do the best for his people and] thoroughly alive to the delights and the responsibilities of his position, and you have a notion of what he would have wished to be thought if he had reflected on that matter. He was not thinking about such things as he descended the slope, but rather about certain prosaic questions which he would have to discuss at length with his bailiff: and he also asked himself incidentally whether he knew or ought to know the person in black who was coming across the fields, and was by this time within a hundred yards of him. To that, however, he gave only a passing thought, and was just a little amused to see that if [after all] he had ventured on a greeting, it would have been addressed to a tall post newly covered with black and glistening tar which stood by the path on his left.

  Two or three little bits of business—a word with the schoolmaster and another with the curate—made his walk home longer by twenty minutes than it need have been, and it was full dusk when he turned into his carriage-drive. But white paper shows up in the dusk and [my friend hated to see scraps of this sort lying about his grounds. Besides which] an envelope lying in the path did not escape my friend’s notice. Even persons who are not offensively tidy dislike to have paper left lying about their premises. [one-word space] picked it up. It was unaddressed, but there seemed to be something in it. He put it in his pocket, and hurried on, anxious to get a letter off by the post which would leave in a quarter of an hour. All the whole of that time must be uninterrupted if the letter were to be finished and sent off: so that the sight of a clerical figure seemingly about to ring the front door bell was rather a vexation. It was a little unreasonable in the neighboring clergy to select this time for paying their calls. Relief succeeded the next moment. No cleric was there: a pillar of the portico had made for itself a deceptive shadow. “Coming events,” he thought (with little originality), “cast their shadows before: probably tomorrow the place will be black with curates.”

  The letter was dispatched, and not long afterward the bailiff, Mr. Runton, entered upon the scene; his business was long and he succeeded in making it appear highly intricate by starting in the middle and going alternately back to the beginning and forward to the end. So that by the time a policy was settled, Humphreys was more than ready for dinner.

  In the course of dressing he turned out the pockets of the coat he had been wearing, with the view, I am afraid, of taking his pipe and tobacco downstairs with him: and among the letters which were gathering fluff and comminuted tobacco in these pockets he recognized the envelope which he had picked up in the drive that evening. It was closed but he could not feel much delicacy about opening it, since therein lay the only chance of returning it to its owner. The contents did not take him much further. Two or three pins, somewhat bent, a small ball of thread tightly rolled, a few withered leaves, and some brown dust: but no letter nor fragment of writing. He doubled up envelope and contents and threw them into the fender.

  “Has anyone called here today? I didn’t happen to look at the card tray in the hall,” he asked the footman as he entered the small room where he dined.

  “Yes sir, there was a lady called to see the grounds.”

  “Oh really? Who was that?”

  “She didn’t give no name, sir, and she ’adn’t got a card, she said.”

  “And didn’t you know who she was? Where did she come from? Was she driving?”

  “No sir, not driving, sir: she came on foot—a holdish lady, very respectable—quite the lady, sir. I don’t know if I done wrong, sir, but I told her I didn’t think there’d be any objection to her walking round the grounds, because I knew the men was about. I ’ope …”

  “No, I daresay it’s all right: and did she walk around the grounds?”

  “Yes sir, she wasn’t only about ten minutes to a quarter of an hour, and I see her go out again by the drive.”

  “Well, I think another time it would be better if you asked anyone who came if they would kindly leave a card or write their names: keep a little book in the hall. I rather prefer to know who comes here.”

  “Yes sir, very well, sir. I hope I didn’t do wrong, but it was such a very respectable person—not like what’d be probable to do no mischief …”

  “Oh no. I don’t think any harm’s done. I am quite willing that people should see the place; only, as I said, I rather like to know who they are.”

  The problem of how to spend the evening alone in a large house was one which Humphreys had had some practice in solving of late. Neighbors were not many, and it happened that several of those families who would in the ordinary way have provided him with society were abroad. But he had just hit upon an employment which would dispose of his leisure for some days to come; and there were but a few days to be tided over before a friend of his own standing was to come for a long visit. This employment was the arranging of the library.

  The manor house possessed something really deserving of the name of a library. It was a large room, specially built in the early years of the nineteenth century to contain books. The windows were on one side only, leaving the whole of the other long wall available for books and fireplaces, of which there were two. Projecting bookcases divided the room into three sections. The fittings were stately and solid. And the shelves held something like five and twenty thousand volumes, hardly a hundred of which were later than 1830. The good man who had brought the collection together had intended to digest it carefully into subjects, and had drawn up a plan of the classes. But he must have been cut off before he had had time
to carry out his design; and his successors, though they kept the books as an appanage of a gentleman’s establishment, had done very little more than put them on the shelves. By way of a catalog there was a handsome series of volumes with gilt and lettered backs, and completely blank insides. Until quite lately the room had been lived in and kept warm, and though there was a musty flavor of unused paper, damp and mice had happily been kept aloof.

  No one could have been better suited for the drudgery of getting the books into order than Humphreys, who was thoroughly fond of a library, and inquisitive about old things, if not deeply versed in them. He had determined to follow out the old collector’s plan of arrangements, and had already spent two evenings in clearing out a division to contain the first class (which as usual was that of divinity). The ejected books were in rows on the floor, and he was gleaning the theology out of the other shelves and depositing it temporarily on long tables set out in the windows. He was getting them into sizes—folio, quarto, octavo and less—for such was the natural and also the ancestral plan—and [every now and then he would] at the same time taking rough notes of titles and dates upon a series of sheets of paper which lay ready. A long, interesting, tranquil process, and he felt at peace with everyone—except perhaps the untimely servant who was heading about with occasional knocks and raps in the passage. He could not be sure whether some of the noises were not knocks on the door, and in some irritation he eventually called out, “Come in, do! Come in, if you want to!” Upon which the noise maker desisted and was heard no more. Humphreys pursued his work for another ten minutes, and then was shaken by a sudden sneeze. He was working in his shirtsleeves and the moment he was thus interrupted he felt that the room was colder than it had been. The reason was not far to seek; the door stood half open; a mistake easily rectified but one which he could not think he had made himself. Probably the footman had left the door on the latch when he had come to see to the fire and bring in the whisky.

  It was now verging on eleven o’clock and Humphreys was conscious of approaching sleep—so he put his papers together and resolved to look through a book for a few minutes in his arm chair. He took a large one at random and settled himself with something to drink and something to smoke. But sleep was coming nearer and nearer, and even to open the book required something of an effort. When he did open it, he was disgusted to find that it was a volume of the projected Catalog of the library, in which, as I said, not one word had been written, though the pages had been numbered. It was too much trouble to get another. He gradually but quickly allowed sleep to come as near as it would.

  The next experience was that he was still in the big chair, and eagerly reading in the book. How was this? He had no time to think, but there was the printed page before him—curiously difficult to read—impossible somehow to glance ahead and take in the sense of the next lines, yet at the same time quite clear: and, though the type looked old—very old—the language was modern English. And as he read, the sentences seemed to fix themselves easily and certainly in his brain. It seemed to be partly a dialogue and partly his own thought, and partly something that he was seeing and doing.

  “You will have to come with me.”

  “Where to?” I said. He said, “A long walk, hard work. It gets darker and I go. You go on. Rain always, and wind: darker still. Is it someone following? Not sure; don’t quite like to stop. Nearly all dark now: one break lighter in the sky there on the left. Someone’s head looking over a rock: gone now—moved down quickly. Must go on. Is that someone following? Wind too loud to hear. I don’t like this. Shall I run? Shall I call out? Who’s there? Something like shouting down the wind.”

  “Don’t!” I said. “Don’t! I know there’s something I want to think of.”

  “Yes, I daresay, but there’s no time. If you could it might be better for you.”

  “Listen, isn’t that someone. Which way was I going? Let me remember. No time: if I stop to think they’ll catch up. Don’t let me lose my head. I’m getting frightened. Why did I come?”

  “Yes, why indeed?” he said. “But turn over and see who’s after you.”

  That was the last line on the page, and Humphreys felt a horror of turning over the leaf. Yet he could not by any means avoid it: it was inevitable, and with a sort of helpless moan he did turn over, and gazed heavily at a great face that was painted on the other side. I really do not know exactly what it was: but it was so terrible an image of corruption and malice and fear, peering out of a dark background, that it scared him clean out of sleep, and he flung the book away with a loud cry, and lay shivering in his chair. There was an oppression on his scalp and his forehead. It felt, he said, like a ragged hand—so much so that he durst not put up his own hand for fear of touching it. But he cowered his head down, and upon the movement it was gone.

  He jumped up and for some time stood, back to the fire, warming himself and gazing over the brightly lit room, where, to be sure, there was nothing to cause him the least uneasiness. Then his eye fell on the accursed book which had given him the nightmare. He picked it up with no very friendly feelings, and it fell open at the leaf whose number he remembered too well. It was, of course, as blank as ever, though it did seem slightly discolored. The sight of it brought the words of his dream back in a flash, and he determined to write them down as a good specimen of dream-literature. For a minute or two he had a difficulty in beginning; the first sentences were unwilling to come: then he happened to glance at the blank leaf of the open book, and from that moment he was certain of his ground. If a word ever failed him, he had but to look toward its probable position, and his brain at once supplied it. When it was done, he read it through. “Yes,” he said, “it seems to be mostly what someone else was trying to make me think—putting words into my mouth, and also answering for himself. I wonder what it was that I ought to have remembered: and where I was supposed to be?” [And by the way dare I turn over the page?]

  Without much purpose, he turned over the leaf, and his heart gave a jump of fear, for the horror of the dream picture suddenly seized on him. It can only have been association. There was nothing but the slight discoloration which had been noticeable on the other side of the leaf.

  There are few things more beautiful than a full September moon shining on the smooth lawns and dark trees of an English garden, and on the oak-grown slopes of an English park. The tide of the year’s life is at the full—just past the full [and on the turn]: there is a lucid interval before death, before the great winds set in and the funereal pomp of the woods is put on. Humphreys felt something of the delight and the foreboding of the time when he threw open his bedroom window that night. Absolute stillness: everything might have been holding its breath and listening for the first whisper of a breeze from the distant sea. Only one prosaic thought crossed his mind as he gazed out—“I’ll have that tree down tomorrow: it spoils that lawn badly.” The tree he meant was a small Irish yew which stood very blackly in the near foreground. And with that he retired to bed, and spent, I fear, but a broken night of beginnings to set out on his “long walk” and unavailing efforts to remember something which constantly just eluded him: while all the time he knew that if he could but secure it he would be safe and quiet.

  After breakfast next morning Humphreys strolled around the garden [with his pipe] smoking: and, chancing to meet the head gardener, he remembered his unknown visitor of the day before, and asked if the men had noticed her.

  “Yes, I think I did see the lady, Mr. [Humphreys ’Erbert] Humphreys, I should say, sir,” thus the gardener began [for he was afflicted with a propensity always to mention the name of the late deceased owner of the mansion]: “she come—well, I was down at that bed [Mr. ’Erbert] what we ’ad the lobelias last year in it, if you recollect—no, to be sure you wasn’t come among us, was you, Mr.—well there—Humphreys—you’ll excuse me, and one of the lads ’elping me.

  “And all in a minute someone passed by goin’ along the walk toward the ’ouse, and I says, ‘William, do you k
now who that was?’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I don’t, Mr. Barker.’ ‘Well,’ I says, ‘it’s a funny thing to me as people should be coming round about ’ere as if the place belonged to ’em. You go and ask ’er, my lad, if she’s any business ’ere. And mind you be’ave civil and touch your cap,’ I says for, mark you Mr. Humphreys, she was quite the lady in ’er [ways] appearance. And so the lad ’e went after ’er, and by what I could understand she was ’alfway up the drive goin’ out when he see her, and not wishin’ to keep me waitin’ he come back: and reely that is the last Mr. [’Erb]—there again Mr. Humphreys …”

  “I see, thanks,” put in Humphreys. “I thought perhaps the lady might have been someone from the village whom you knew by sight.”

  “No Sir, no, Mr. Humphreys, no one from the village, not that I know,” said Mr. Barker with ready zeal. “Quite a visitor to this part I took her to be, sir.”

  “Just so. Well, Mr. Barker, there’s one little matter I wanted to mention—that little Irish yew just below my bedroom window. It rather spoils that bit of lawn, and it isn’t much of a tree. I’d like you to make away with it altogether, please.”

  Mr. Barker put his hand to his mouth as one who reflects. “To be sure, sir,” he said. “Well—there. If you don’t mind the trouble, Mr. Humphreys, I should be very obliged to you just to step round and point it hout to me. Then there won’t be no mistake about it. The reason why I hask you is because in the late Mr. ’Erbert’s time there was one of these fancy maple trees we ’ad—I could show you the place now not an ’undred yards away—very well, another time, sir: any time I could point out the spot and welcome—and I recollect as well as possible ’im saying to me one morning …” The rest of the short journey was occupied with the recital of how the maple had been cut down and how subsequently Mr. Herbert had repudiated all knowledge of this matter and had spoken “really very short” about it. “And ’aving that in my view,” concluded Mr. Barker, “I like to avoid what mistakes I can do, and if you’ll be so good as point me out the tree, Sir, I’ll see to the matter at once.”