Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  “It’s all right, thanks; but if you’ll collect some of these pencils and things that are lying about I shall be much obliged. Now I think we’ve got everything, and we might get back to the house.”

  They left the maze, Humphreys rolling up the clue as they went.

  The night was rainy.

  Most unfortunately it turned out that, whether by Cooper’s fault or not, the plan had been the one thing forgotten the evening before. As was to be expected, it was ruined by the wet. There was nothing for it but to begin again (the job would not be a long one this time). The clue therefore was put in place once more and a fresh start made. But Humphreys had not done much before an interruption came in the shape of Calton with a telegram. His late chief in London wanted to consult him. Only a brief interview was wanted, but the summons was urgent. This was annoying, yet it was not really upsetting; there was a train available in half an hour, and, unless things went very cross, he could be back, possibly by five o’clock, certainly by eight. He gave the plan to Calton to take to the house, but it was not worth while to remove the clue.

  All went as he had hoped. He spent a rather exciting evening in the library, for he lighted to-night upon a cupboard where some of the rarer books were kept. When he went up to bed he was glad to find that the servant had remembered to leave his curtains undrawn and his windows open. He put down his light, and went to the window which commanded a view of the garden and the park. It was a brilliant moonlight night. In a few weeks’ time the sonorous winds of autumn would break up all this calm. But now the distant woods were in a deep stillness; the slopes of the lawns were shining with dew; the colours of some of the flowers could almost be guessed. The light of the moon just caught the cornice of the temple and the curve of its leaden dome, and Humphreys had to own that, so seen, these conceits of a past age have a real beauty. In short, the light, the perfume of the woods, and the absolute quiet called up such kind old associations in his mind that he went on ruminating them for a long, long time. As he turned from the window he felt he had never seen anything more complete of its sort. The one feature that struck him with a sense of incongruity was a small Irish yew, thin and black, which stood out like an outpost of the shrubbery, through which the maze was approached. That, he thought, might as well be away: the wonder was that anyone should have thought it would look well in that position.

  However, next morning, in the press of answering letters and going over books with Mr. Cooper, the Irish yew was forgotten. One letter, by the way, arrived this day which has to be mentioned. It was from that Lady Wardrop whom Miss Cooper had mentioned, and it renewed the application which she had addressed to Mr. Wilson. She pleaded, in the first place, that she was about to publish a Book of Mazes, and earnestly desired to include the plan of the Wilsthorpe Maze, and also that it would be a great kindness if Mr. Humphreys could let her see it (if at all) at an early date, since she would soon have to go abroad for the winter months. Her house at Bentley was not far distant, so Humphreys was able to send a note by hand to her suggesting the very next day or the day after for her visit; it may be said at once that the messenger brought back a most grateful answer, to the effect that the morrow would suit her admirably.

  The only other event of the day was that the plan of the maze was successfully finished.

  This night again was fair and brilliant and calm, and Humphreys lingered almost as long at his window. The Irish yew came to his mind again as he was on the point of drawing his curtains: but either he had been misled by a shadow the night before, or else the shrub was not really so obtrusive as he had fancied. Anyhow, he saw no reason for interfering with it. What he would do away with, however, was a clump of dark growth which had usurped a place against the house wall, and was threatening to obscure one of the lower range of windows. It did not look as if it could possibly be worth keeping; he fancied it dank and unhealthy, little as he could see of it.

  Next day (it was a Friday—he had arrived at Wilsthorpe on a Monday) Lady Wardrop came over in her car soon after luncheon. She was a stout elderly person, very full of talk of all sorts and particularly inclined to make herself agreeable to Humphreys, who had gratified her very much by his ready granting of her request. They made a thorough exploration of the place together; and Lady Wardrop’s opinion of her host obviously rose sky-high when she found that he really knew something of gardening. She entered enthusiastically into all his plans for improvement, but agreed that it would be a vandalism to interfere with the characteristic laying-out of the ground near the house. With the temple she was particularly delighted, and, said she, “Do you know, Mr. Humphreys, I think your bailiff must be right about those lettered blocks of stone. One of my mazes—I’m sorry to say the stupid people have destroyed it now—it was at a place in Hampshire—had the track marked out in that way. They were tiles there, but lettered just like yours, and the letters, taken in the right order, formed an inscription—what it was I forget—something about Theseus and Ariadne. I have a copy of it, as well as the plan of the maze where it was. How people can do such things! I shall never forgive you if you injure your maze. Do you know, they’re becoming very uncommon? Almost every year I hear of one being grubbed up. Now, do let’s get straight to it: or, if you’re too busy, I know my way there perfectly, and I’m not afraid of getting lost in it; I know too much about mazes for that. Though I remember missing my lunch—not so very long ago either—through getting entangled in the one at Busbury.24 Well, of course, if you can manage to come with me, that will be all the nicer.”

  After this confident prelude justice would seem to require that Lady Wardrop should have been hopelessly muddled by the Wilsthorpe maze. Nothing of that kind happened: yet it is to be doubted whether she got all the enjoyment from her new specimen that she expected. She was interested—keenly interested—to be sure, and pointed out to Humphreys a series of little depressions in the ground which, she thought, marked the places of the lettered blocks. She told him, too, what other mazes resembled his most closely in arrangement, and explained how it was usually possible to date a maze to within twenty years by means of its plan. This one, she already knew, must be about as old as 1780, and its features were just what might be expected. The globe, furthermore, completely absorbed her. It was unique in her experience, and she pored over it for long. “I should like a rubbing of that,” she said, “if it could possibly be made. Yes, I am sure you would be most kind about it, Mr. Humphreys, but I trust you won’t attempt it on my account, I do indeed; I shouldn’t like to take any liberties here. I have the feeling that it might be resented. Now, confess,” she went on, turning and facing Humphreys, “don’t you feel—haven’t you felt ever since you came in here—that a watch is being kept on us, and that if we overstepped the mark in any way there would be a—well, a pounce? No? I do; and I don’t care how soon we are outside the gate.

  “After all,” she said, when they were once more on their way to the house, “it may have been only the airlessness and the dull heat on that place that pressed on my brain. Still, I’ll take back one thing I said. I’m not sure that I shan’t forgive you after all, if I find next spring that that maze has been grubbed up.”

  “Whether or no that’s done, you shall have the plan, Lady Wardrop. I have made one, and no later than to-night I can trace you a copy.”

  “Admirable: a pencil tracing will be all I want, with an indication of the scale. I can easily have it brought into line with the rest of my plates. Many, many thanks.”

  “Very well, you shall have that to-morrow. I wish you could help me to a solution of my block-puzzle.”

  “What, those stones in the summer-house? That is a puzzle; they are in no sort of order? Or course not. But the men who put them down must have had some directions—perhaps you’ll find a paper about it among your uncle’s things. If not, you’ll have to call in somebody who’s an expert in cyphers.”

  “Advise me about something else, please,” said Humphreys. “That bush-thing under the library w
indow: you would have that away, wouldn’t you?”

  “Which? That? Oh, I think not,” said Lady Wardrop. “I can’t see it very well from this distance, but it’s not unsightly.”

  “Perhaps you’re right; only, looking out of my window, just above it, last night, I thought it took up too much room. It doesn’t seem to, as one sees it from here, certainly. Very well, I’ll leave it alone for a bit.”

  Tea was the next business, soon after which Lady Wardrop drove off; but, half-way down the drive, she stopped the car and beckoned to Humphreys, who was still on the front-door steps. He ran to glean her parting words, which were: “It just occurs to me, it might be worth your while to look at the underside of those stones. They must have been numbered, mustn’t they? Good-bye again. Home, please.”

  The main occupation of this evening at any rate was settled. The tracing of the plan for Lady Wardrop and the careful collation of it with the original meant a couple of hours’ work at least. Accordingly, soon after nine Humphreys had his materials put out in the library and began. It was a still, stuffy evening; windows had to stand open, and he had more than one grisly encounter with a bat. These unnerving episodes made him keep the tail of his eye on the window. Once or twice it was a question whether there was—not a bat, but something more considerable—that had a mind to join him. How unpleasant it would be if someone had slipped noiselessly over the sill and was crouching on the floor!

  The tracing of the plan was done: it remained to compare it with the original, and to see whether any paths had been wrongly closed or left open. With one finger on each paper, he traced out the course that must be followed from the entrance. There were one or two slight mistakes, but here, near the centre, was a bad confusion, probably due to the entry of the Second or Third Bat. Before correcting the copy he followed out carefully the last turnings of the path on the original. These, at least, were right; they led without a hitch to the middle space. Here was a feature which need not be repeated on the copy—an ugly black spot about the size of a shilling. Ink? No. It resembled a hole, but how should a hole be there? He stared at it with tired eyes: the work of tracing had been very laborious, and he was drowsy and oppressed. . . . But surely this was a very odd hole. It seemed to go not only through the paper, but through the table on which it lay. Yes, and through the floor below that, down, and still down, even into infinite depths. He craned over it, utterly bewildered. Just as, when you were a child, you may have pored over a square inch of counterpane until it became a landscape with wooded hills, and perhaps even churches and houses, and you lost all thought of the true size of yourself and it, so this hole seemed to Humphreys for the moment the only thing in the world. For some reason it was hateful to him from the first, but he had gazed at it for some moments before any feeling of anxiety came upon him; and then it did come, stronger and stronger—a horror lest something might emerge from it, and a really agonizing conviction that a terror was on its way, from the sight of which he would not be able to escape. Oh yes, far, far down there was a movement, and the movement was upwards—towards the surface. Nearer and nearer it came, and it was of a blackish-grey colour with more than one dark hole. It took shape as a face—a human face—a burnt human face: and with the odious writhings of a wasp creeping out of a rotten apple there clambered forth an appearance of a form, waving black arms prepared to clasp the head that was bending over them. With a convulsion of despair Humphreys threw himself back, struck his head against a hanging lamp, and fell.

  There was concussion of the brain, shock to the system, and a long confinement to bed. The doctor was badly puzzled, not by the symptoms, but by a request which Humphreys made to him as soon as he was able to say anything. “I wish you would open the ball in the maze.” “Hardly room enough there, I should have thought,” was the best answer he could summon up; “but it’s more in your way than mine; my dancing days are over.” At which Humphreys muttered and turned over to sleep, and the doctor intimated to the nurses that the patient was not out of the wood yet. When he was better able to express his views, Humphreys made his meaning clear, and received a promise that the thing should be done at once. He was so anxious to learn the result that the doctor, who seemed a little pensive next morning, saw that more harm than good would be done by saving up his report. “Well,” he said, “I am afraid the ball is done for; the metal must have worn thin, I suppose. Anyhow, it went all to bits with the first blow of the chisel.” “Well? go on, do!” said Humphreys impatiently. “Oh! you want to know what we found in it, of course. Well, it was half full of stuff like ashes.” “Ashes? What did you make of them?” “I haven’t thoroughly examined them yet; there’s hardly been time: but Cooper’s made up his mind—I dare say from something I said—that it’s a case of cremation. . . . Now don’t excite yourself, my good sir: yes, I must allow I think he’s probably right.”

  The maze is gone, and Lady Wardrop has forgiven Humphreys; in fact, I believe he married her niece. She was right, too, in her conjecture that the stones in the temple were numbered. There had been a numeral painted on the bottom of each. Some few of these had rubbed off, but enough remained to enable Humphreys to reconstruct the inscription. It ran thus:

  “PENETRANS AD INTERIORA MORTIS.”25

  Grateful as Humphreys was to the memory of his uncle, he could not quite forgive him for having burnt the journals and letters of the James Wilson who had gifted Wilsthorpe with the maze and the temple. As to the circumstances of that ancestor’s death and burial no tradition survived; but his will, which was almost the only record of him accessible, assigned an unusually generous legacy to a servant who bore an Italian name.

  Mr. Cooper’s view is that, humanly speaking, all these many solemn events have a meaning for us, if our limited intelligence permitted of our disintegrating it, while Mr. Calton has been reminded of an aunt now gone from us, who, about the year 1866, had been lost for upwards of an hour and a half in the maze at Covent Gardens, or it might be Hampton Court.

  One of the oddest things in the whole series of transactions is that the book which contained the Parable has entirely disappeared. Humphreys has never been able to find it since he copied out the passage to send to Lady Wardrop.

  APPENDIX

  GHOST STORIES

  I

  Everyone, I think, has an innate love of the supernatural. Everyone can remember a time when he has carefully searched his curtains—and poked in the dark corners of his room before retiring to rest—with a sort of pleasurable uncertainty as to whether there might not be a saucer-eyed skeleton or a skinny sheeted ghoul in hiding somewhere. I invariably go through this ceremony myself. Of course we all know there are no such things,—but some one might be going to play us a trick, you know, and anyhow it’s best to be quite sure. People do tell such very odd stories. Such is the substance of most people’s expressed views about ghosts, as heard either in the course of conversation, or in debating—where the subject is discussed on the average once in a two halves—and the opener is credulous, and “every speaker tells his tale,” and one audacious mortal opposes—rarely more. I pity that rash individual when he seeks his couch.

  Some classes of ghost stories it is very hard, seriously speaking, not to believe. Omens, Family Tokens and Forewarnings are of this sort. Here is one, “never before published,” told me by an old man “who was there at the time.” I suppress names.

  In the early part of last century, the wife of the squire of a certain village was driving across her park on the way to a county ball. The evening was grey and misty. [This goes without saying.] Suddenly she looked out of the carriage window and “saw suffen;” as to what the something was my old man would not venture a statement, I gathered, however, that it was the lady’s “double.” One of the horses broke loose, the other turned straight back to the Hall.

  The lady never went out of the house again except in her coffin. [Impressive silence.] Of course my informant didn’t go to believe no such thing; but still, there was the story.


  One really authentic one, which I fear a good many people must know, and I will lay my unquiet pen. To be short: General Blucher was returning home alone from the wars. On entering the house he saw, sitting at the fire in a peculiar attitude, his parents—long since dead, and his sisters sitting round the room. On greeting them he received no answer. One of his sisters rose and touched him. He swooned, and when he came to himself was alone. He was for some days delirious, but in a lucid interval, feeling himself at the point of death, he sent for his sovereign, told him the facts: said his sister had warned him he was to die that day, and so expired.

  The aspect of my furniture is so terrific at this point that I really must stop.

  II

  I am painfully aware that my last effort on this subject was meagre and abrupt in the extreme. But this, I have no doubt, everyone who took the trouble to read it, perceived for himself.

  It strikes me after a perusal of several books of tales of the supernatural, that no really adequate collection of them has yet appeared; including, as it should, the best both of fiction and of real life. Such a book would be almost as hard to produce as a good hymn book. First, the compiler must be particular in his choice; for the numberless “well authenticated” ghost stories one meets with in the ordinary collections, have a certain sameness about them which tells after awhile. We all know how, in 18—, Mrs. C—, a respectable lady residing in the small town of D——, was one day sitting by an open window looking out into a small garden in front of the house; and how she saw her nephew—at that moment in India—walking up a gravel path leading to the front door, and how she exclaimed “That’s Johnny,” when he instantly disappeared, and how the next mail brought the news of his death, which had occurred at the precise moment at which she had seen the apparition. So much for the commonest form of story.