Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M.R. James

by M. R. James

  Burton seemed about to make a remark, but suppressed it.

  Decidedly this was not Burton’s day out. He choked at lunch, he broke a pipe, he tripped in the carpet, he dropped his book in the pond in the garden.

  Later on he had or professed to have a telephone call summoning him back to town next day and cutting short what should have been a week’s visit. And so glum was he all the evening that Manners’ disappointment in losing an ordinarily cheerful companion was not very sharp.

  At breakfast Mr. Burton said little about his night. But he did intimate that he thought of looking in on his doctor. “My hand’s so shaky,” he said, “I really daren’t shave this morning.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” said Mr. Manners, “my man could have managed that for you. But they’ll put you right in no time.”

  Farewells were said.

  By some means and for some reason Mr. Burton contrived to reserve a compartment to himself. (The train was not of the corridor type.) But these precautions avail little against the angry dead.

  I will not put dots or stars, for I dislike them, but I will say that apparently someone tried to shave Mr. Burton in the train, and did not succeed overly well.

  He was however satisfied with what he had done, if we may judge from the fact that on a once-white napkin spread on Mr. Burton’s chest was an inscription in red letters:

  GEO. W. FECI.

  Do not these facts—if facts they are—bear out my suggestion that there is something not inanimate behind the Malice of Inanimate Objects?

  Do they not further suggest that when this malice begins to show itself we should be very particular to examine and if possible rectify any obliquities in our recent conduct?

  And do they not, finally, almost force upon us the conclusion that, like Squire Korbes, Mr. Burton must have been either a very wicked or a singularly unfortunate man?

  A Vignette

  YOU ARE ASKED to think of the spacious garden of a country rectory, adjacent to a park of many acres, and separated therefrom by a belt of trees of some age which we knew as the Plantation. It is but about thirty or forty yards broad. A close gate of split oak leads to it from the path encircling the garden, and when you enter it from that side you put your hand through a square hole cut in it and lift the hook to pass along to the iron gate which admits to the park from the Plantation.

  It has further to be added that from some windows of the rectory, which stands on a somewhat lower level than the Plantation, parts of the path leading thereto, and the oak gate itself can be seen. Some of the trees, Scotch firs and others, which form a backing and a surrounding, are of considerable size, but there is nothing that diffuses a mysterious gloom or imparts a sinister flavor—nothing of melancholy or funereal associations.

  The place is well clad, and there are secret nooks and retreats among the bushes, but there is neither offensive bleakness nor oppressive darkness. It is, indeed, a matter for some surprise when one thinks it over, that any cause for misgivings of a nervous sort have attached itself to so normal and cheerful a spot, the more so, since neither our childish mind when we lived there nor the more inquisitive years that came later ever nosed out any legend or reminiscence of old or recent unhappy things.

  Yet to me they came, even to me, leading an exceptionally happy wholesome existence, and guarded—not strictly but as carefully as was any way necessary—from uncanny fancies and fear. Not that such guarding avails to close up all gates.

  I should be puzzled to fix the date at which any sort of misgiving about the Plantation gate first visited me. Possibly it was in the years just before I went to school, possibly on one later summer afternoon of which I have a faint memory, when I was coming back after solitary roaming in the park, or, as I bethink me, from tea at the Hall: anyhow, alone, and fell in with one of the villagers also homeward bound just as I was about to turn off the road on to the track leading to the Plantation.

  We broke off our talk with “good nights,” and when I looked back at him after a minute or so I was just a little surprised to see him standing still and looking after me. But no remark passed, and on I went.

  By the time I was within the iron gate and outside the park, dusk had undoubtedly come on; but there was no lack yet of light, and I could not account to myself for the questionings which certainly did rise as to the presence of anyone else among the trees, questionings to which I could not very certainly say “No,” nor, I was glad to feel, “Yes,” because if there were anyone they could not well have any business there.

  To be sure, it is difficult, in anything like a grove, to be quite certain that nobody is making a screen out of a tree trunk and keeping it between you and him as he moves around it and you walk on. All I can say is that if such a one was there he was no neighbor or acquaintance of mine, and there was some indication about him of being cloaked or hooded. But I think I may have moved at a rather quicker pace than before, and have been particular about shutting the gate.

  I think, too, that after that evening something of what Hamlet calls a “gain-giving” may have been present in my mind when I thought of the Plantation. I do seem to remember looking out of a window which gave in that direction, and questioning whether there was or was not any appearance of a moving form among the trees. If I did, and perhaps I did, hint a suspicion to the nurse the only answer to it will have been “The hidea of such a thing!” and an injunction to make haste and get into my bed.

  Whether it was on that night or a later one that I seem to see myself again in the small hours gazing out of the window across moonlit grass and hoping I was mistaken in fancying any movement in that half-hidden corner of the garden, I cannot now be sure. But it was certainly within a short while that I began to be visited by dreams which I would much rather not have had—which, in fact, I came to dread acutely; and the point around which they centered was the Plantation gate.

  As years go on it but seldom happens that a dream is disturbing. Awkward it may be, as when, while I am drying myself after a bath, I open the bedroom door and step out on to a populous railway platform and have to invent rapid and flimsy excuses for the deplorable déshabille.

  But such a vision is not alarming, though it may make one despair of ever holding up one’s head again. But in the times of which I am thinking, it did happen, not often, but oftener than I liked, that the moment a dream set in I knew that it was going to turn out ill, and that there was nothing I could do to keep it on cheerful lines.

  Ellis the gardener might be wholesomely employed with rake and spade as I watched at the window; other familiar figures might pass and repass on harmless errands; but I was not deceived. I could see that the time was coming when the gardener and the rest would be gathering up their properties and setting off on paths that led homeward or into some safe outer world, and the garden would be left—to itself, shall we say, or to denizens who did not desire quite ordinary company and were only waiting for the word “all clear” to slip into their posts of vantage.

  Now, too, was the moment near when the surroundings began to take on a threatening look; that the sunlight lost power and a quality of light replaced it which, though I did not know it at the time, my memory years after told me was the lifeless pallor of an eclipse. The effect of all this was to intensify the foreboding that had begun to possess me, and to make me look anxiously about, dreading that in some quarter my fear would take a visible shape.

  I had not much doubt which way to look. Surely behind those bushes, among those trees, there was motion, yes, and surely—and more quickly than seemed possible—there was motion, not now among the trees, but on the very path toward the house. I was still at the window, and before I could adjust myself to the new fear there came the impression of a tread on the stairs and a hand on the door.

  That was as far as the dream got, at first; and for me it was far enough. I had no notion what would have been the next development, more than that it was bound to be horrifying.

  That is enough in all conscience ab
out the beginning of my dreams. A beginning it was only, for something like it came again and again; how often I can’t tell, but often enough to give me an acute distaste for being left alone in that region of the garden. I came to fancy that I could see in the behavior of the village people whose work took them that way an anxiety to be past a certain point, and moreover a welcoming of company as they approached that corner of the park. But on this it will not do to lay overmuch stress, for, as I have said, I could never glean any kind of story bound up with the place.

  However, the strong probability that there had been one once I cannot deny.

  I must not by the way give the impression that the whole of the Plantation was haunted ground. There were trees there most admirably devised for climbing and reading in; there was a wall, along the top of which you could walk for many hundred yards and reach a frequented road, passing farmyard and familiar houses; and once in the park, which had its own delights of wood and water, you were well out of range of anything suspicious—or, if that is too much to say, of anything that suggested the Plantation gate.

  But I am reminded, as I look on these pages, that so far we have had only preamble, and that there is very little in the way of actual incident to come, and that the criticism attributed to the devil when he sheared the sow is like to be justified. What, after all, was the outcome of the dreams to which without saying a word about them I was liable during a good space of time? Well, it presents itself to me thus.

  One afternoon—the day being neither overcast nor threatening—I was at my window in the upper floor of the house. All the family was out. From some obscure shelf in a disused room I had worried out a book, not very recondite: it was, in fact, a bound volume of a magazine in which were contained parts of a novel. I know now what novel it was, but I did not then, and a sentence struck and arrested me.

  Someone was walking at dusk up a solitary lane by an old mansion in Ireland, and being a man of imagination he was suddenly forcibly impressed by what he calls “the aerial image of the old house, with its peculiar malign, scared, and skulking aspect” peering out of the shade of its neglected old trees.

  The words were quite enough to set my own fancy on a bleak track. Inevitably I looked and looked with apprehension, to the Plantation gate. As was but right it was shut, and nobody was upon the path that led to it or from it. But as I said a while ago, there was in it a square hole giving access to the fastening; and through that hole, I could see—and it struck like a blow on the diaphragm—something white or partly white.

  Now this I could not bear, and with an access of something like courage—only it was more like desperation, like determining that I must know the worst—I did steal down and, quite uselessly, of course, taking cover behind bushes as I went, I made progress until I was within range of the gate and the hole. Things were—alas!—worse than I had feared: through that hole a face was looking my way.

  It was not monstrous, not pale, fleshless, spectral. Malevolent I thought and think it was; at any rate the eyes were large and open and fixed. It was pink and, I thought, hot, and just above the eyes the border of a white linen drapery hung down from the brows.

  There is something horrifying in the sight of a face looking at one out of a frame as this did; more particularly if its gaze is unmistakably fixed upon you. Nor does it make the matter any better if the expression gives no clue to what is to come next.

  I said just now that I took this face to be malevolent, and so I did, but not in regard of any positive dislike or fierceness which it expressed. It was, indeed, quite without emotion. I was only conscious that I could see the whites of the eyes all around the pupil, and that, we know, has a glamour of madness about it.

  The immovable face was enough for me. I fled, but at what I thought must be a safe distance inside my own precincts I could not but halt and look back. There was no white thing framed in the hole of the gate, but there was a draped form shambling away among the trees.

  Do not press me with questions as to how I bore myself when it became necessary to face my family again. That I was upset by something I had seen must have been pretty clear, but I am very sure that I fought off all attempts to describe it.

  Why I make a lame effort to do it now I cannot very well explain: it undoubtedly has had some formidable power of clinging through many years to my imagination. I feel that even now I should be circumspect in passing that Plantation gate; and every now and again the question haunts me:

  Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them? And perhaps that is just as well for the peace of mind of simple people.

  The Bulbul and the Cuckoo

  AN INDIAN FOLK TALE

  THERE WAS ONCE A BULBUL, and one day as he was flying about he saw a tree on which was a little fruit. The bulbul was much pleased, and said, “I will sit here till this fruit is ripe and then I will eat it.”

  So he deserted his nest and his wife and sat there for twelve years without eating anything, and every day he said, “Tomorrow I will eat this fruit.”

  During those twelve years a great many birds tried to sit on the tree and wished to build nests in it, but whenever they came the bulbul sent them away saying, “This fruit is not good. Don’t come here.”

  One day a cuckoo came and said, “Why do you send us away? Why should we not come sit here too? All the trees here are not yours.”

  “Never mind,” said the bulbul, “I am going to sit here, and when this fruit is ripe, I shall eat it.”

  Now the cuckoo knew that this tree was the cotton-tree, but the bulbul did not. First comes the bud, which the bulbul thought a fruit, then comes the flower; the flower becomes a big pod, the pod bursts, and all the cotton flies away.

  The bulbul was delighted when he saw the beautiful red flower, which he still thought a fruit, and said, “When it is ripe, it will be a delicious fruit.”

  The flower became a pod, and the pod burst.

  “What is all this that is flying about?” said the bulbul. “The fruit must be ripe now.”

  So he looked into the pod, and it was empty—all the cotton had fallen out.

  Then the cuckoo came and said to the angry bulbul, “You see, if you had allowed us to come sit on the tree, you would have had something good to eat; but as you were selfish, and would not let any one share with you, God is angry and has punished you by giving you a hollow fruit.”

  And the cuckoo called all the other birds and they came and mocked the bulbul. The bulbul got very angry, and all the birds went away.

  After they had gone, the bulbul said to the tree, “You are a bad tree. You are of use to no one. You give food to no one.”

  The tree said, “You are mistaken. God made me what I am. My flower is given to sheep to eat. My cotton makes pillows and mattresses for man.”

  Since that day no bulbul goes near a cotton tree.

  Stories I Have Tried to Write

  I HAVE NEITHER much experience nor much perseverance in the writing of stories—I am thinking exclusively of ghost stories, for I have never cared to try any other kind—and it has amused me sometimes to think of the stories which have crossed my mind from time to time and never materialized properly.

  Never properly: for some of them I have actually written down, and they repose in a drawer somewhere. To borrow Sir Walter Scott’s most frequent quotation, “Look on (them) again I dare not.” They are not good enough. Yet some of them had ideas in them which refused to blossom in the surroundings I had devised for them, but perhaps came up in other forms in stories that did get as far as print. Let me recall them for the benefit (so to style it) of someone else.

  There was the story of a man traveling in a train in France. Facing him sat a typical Frenchwoman of mature years, with the usual mustache and a very confirmed countenance.
He had nothing to read but an antiquated novel he had bought for the binding—Madame de Lichtenstein it was called.

  Tired of looking out of the window and studying his vis-à-vis, he began drowsily turning the pages and paused at a conversation between two of the characters. They were discussing an acquaintance, a woman who lived in a largish house at Marcilly-le-Hayer. The house was described, and—here we are coming to a point—the mysterious disappearance of the woman’s husband. Her name was mentioned, and my reader couldn’t help thinking he knew it in some other connection.

  Just then the train stopped at a country station, the traveler, with a start, woke up from a doze—the book open in his hand—the woman opposite him got out, and on the label of her bag he read the name that seemed to be in his novel.

  Well, he went on to Troyes, and from there he made excursions, and one of these took him—at lunchtime—to—yes, to Marcilly-le-Hayer. The hotel in the Grand Place faced a three-gabled house of some pretensions. Out of it came a well-dressed woman, whom he had seen before. Conversation with the waiter. Yes, the lady was a widow, or so it was believed. At any rate nobody knew what had become of her husband. Here I think we broke down. Of course, there was no such conversation in the novel as the traveler thought he had read.

  Then there was quite a long one about two undergraduates spending Christmas in a country house that belonged to one of them. An uncle, next heir to the estate, lived near. Plausible and learned Roman priest, living with the uncle, makes himself agreeable to the young men. Dark walks home at night after dining with the uncle. Curious disturbances as they pass through the shrubberies. Strange, shapeless tracks in the snow around the house, observed in the morning. Efforts to lure away the companion and isolate the proprietor and get him to come out after dark. Ultimate defeat and death of the priest, upon whom the Familiar, balked of another victim, turns.