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

by M. R. James

  “What has that to do with it, George? I should have thought you would have guessed that if I can’t get the things I want in Maldon I shall have to write to all manner of shops in town: and they are certain to send something quite unsuitable in price or quality the first time.

  “If you have actually made an appointment with Mr. Williamson, you had better keep it, but I must say I think you might have let me know.”

  “Oh no, no, it wasn’t really an appointment. I quite see what you mean. I’ll go. And what shall you do yourself?”

  “Why, when the work of the house is arranged for, I must see about laying out my new rose garden. By the way, before you start for Maldon I wish you would just take Collins to look at the place I fixed upon. You know it, of course.”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure that I do, Mary. Is it at the upper end, toward the village?”

  “Good gracious no, my dear George. I thought I had made that quite clear. No, it’s that small clearing just off the shrubbery path that goes toward the church.”

  “Oh yes, where we were saying there must have been a summer-house once: the place with the old seat and the posts. But do you think there’s enough sun there?”

  “My dear George, do allow me some common sense, and don’t credit me with all your ideas about summer-houses. Yes, there will be plenty of sun when we have got rid of some of those box-bushes. I know what you are going to say, and I have as little wish as you to strip the place bare.

  “All I want Collins to do is to clear away the old seats and the posts and things before I come out in an hour’s time. And I hope you will manage to get off fairly soon. After luncheon I think I shall go on with my sketch of the church, and if you please you can go over to the links, or—”

  “Ah, a good idea—very good! Yes, you finish that sketch, Mary, and I should be glad of a round.”

  “I was going to say, you might call on the Bishop, but I suppose it is no use my making any suggestion. And now do be getting ready, or half the morning will be gone.”

  Mr. Anstruther’s face, which had shown symptoms of lengthening, shortened itself again, and he hurried from the room, and was soon heard giving orders in the passage. Mrs. Anstruther, a stately dame of some fifty summers, proceeded, after a second consideration of the morning’s letters, to her housekeeping.

  Within a few minutes Mr. Anstruther had discovered Collins in the greenhouse, and they were on their way to the site of the projected rose garden.

  I do not know much about the conditions most suitable to these nurseries, but I am inclined to believe that Mrs. Anstruther, though in the habit of describing herself as “a great gardener,” had not been well advised in the selection of a spot for the purpose.

  It was a small, dank clearing, bounded on one side by a path, and on the other by thick box-bushes, laurels, and other evergreens. The ground was almost bare of grass and dark of aspect. Remains of rustic seats and an old and corrugated oak post somewhere near the middle of the clearing had given rise to Mr. Anstruther’s conjecture that a summer-house had once stood there.

  Clearly Collins had not been put in possession of his mistress’ intentions with regard to this plot of ground, and when he learned them from Mr. Anstruther he displayed no enthusiasm.

  “Of course I could clear them seats away soon enough,” he said. “They aren’t no ornament to the place, Mr. Anstruther, and rotten too. Look ’ere, sir”—and he broke off a large piece—“rotten right through. Yes, clear them away, to be sure we can do that.”

  “And the post,” said Mr. Anstruther, “that’s got to go too.”

  Collins advanced, and shook the post with both hands. Then he rubbed his chin.

  “That’s firm in the ground, that post is,” he said. “That’s been there a number of years, Mr. Anstruther. I doubt I won’t get that up not quite so soon as what I can do with them seats.”

  “But your mistress specially wishes it to be got out of the way in an hour’s time,” said Mr. Anstruther.

  Collins smiled and shook his head slowly. “You’ll excuse me, sir, but you feel of it for yourself. No, sir, no one can’t do what’s impossible to ’em, can they, sir? I could git that post up by after tea-time, sir, but that’ll want a lot of digging.

  “What you require, you see, sir, if you’ll excuse me naming of it, you want the soil loosening round this post ’ere, and me and the boy we shall take a little time doing of that. But now, these ’ere seats,” said Collins, appearing to appropriate this portion of the scheme as due to his own resourcefulness, “why, I can get the barrer round and ’ave them cleared away in, why less than an hour’s time from now, if you’ll permit of it. Only—”

  “Only what, Collins?”

  “Well now, it ain’t for me to go against orders no more than what it is for you yourself—or anyone else” (this was added somewhat hurriedly), “but if you’ll pardon me, sir, this ain’t the place I should have picked out for no rose garden myself. Why look at them box and laurestinus, ’ow they reg’lar preclude the light from—”

  “Ah yes, but we’ve got to get rid of some of them, of course.”

  “Oh, indeed, get rid of them! Yes, to be sure, but—I beg your pardon, Mr. Anstruther—”

  “I’m sorry, Collins, but I must be getting on now. I hear the car at the door. Your mistress will explain exactly what she wishes. I’ll tell her, then, that you can see your way to clearing away the seats at once, and the post this afternoon. Good morning.”

  Collins was left rubbing his chin.

  Mrs. Anstruther received the report with some discontent, but did not insist upon any change of plan.

  By four o’clock that afternoon she had dismissed her husband to his golf, had dealt faithfully with Collins and with the other duties of the day, and, having sent a campstool and umbrella to the proper spot, had just settled down to her sketch of the church as seen from the shrubbery, when a maid came hurrying down the path to report that Miss Wilkins had called.

  Miss Wilkins was one of the few remaining members of the family from whom the Anstruthers had bought the Westfield estate some few years back. She had been staying in the neighborhood, and this was probably a farewell visit.

  “Perhaps you could ask Miss Wilkins to join me here,” said Mrs. Anstruther, and soon Miss Wilkins, a person of mature years, approached.

  “Yes, I’m leaving the Ashes tomorrow, and I shall be able to tell my brother how tremendously you have improved the place. Of course he can’t help regretting the old house just a little—as I do myself—but the garden is really delightful now.”

  “I am so glad you can say so. But you mustn’t think we’ve finished our improvements. Let me show you where I mean to put a rose garden. It’s close by here.”

  The details of the project were laid before Miss Wilkins at some length, but her thoughts were evidently elsewhere.

  “Yes, delightful,” she said at last rather absently. “But do you know, Mrs. Anstruther, I’m afraid I was thinking of old times. I’m very glad to have seen just this spot again before you altered it. Frank and I had quite a romance about this place.”

  “Yes?” said Mrs. Anstruther smilingly. “Do tell me what it was. Something quaint and charming, I’m sure.”

  “Not so very charming, but it has always seemed to me curious. Neither of us would ever be here alone when we were children, and I’m not sure that I should care about it now in certain moods. It is one of those things that can hardly be put into words—by me at least—and that sound rather foolish if they are not properly expressed. I can tell you after a fashion what it was that gave us—well, almost a horror of the place when we were alone.

  “It was toward the evening of one very hot autumn day, when Frank had disappeared mysteriously about the grounds, and I was looking for him to fetch him to tea, and going down this path I suddenly saw him, not hiding in the bushes, as I rather expected, but sitting on the bench in the old summer-house—there was a wooden summer-house here, you know—up in the corner,
asleep, but with such a dreadful look on his face that I really thought he must be ill or even dead.

  “I rushed at him and shook him, and told him to wake up; and wake up he did, with a scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed almost beside himself with fright. He hurried me away to the house, and was in a terrible state all that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had to sit up with him, as far as I remember.

  “He was better very soon, but for days I couldn’t get him to say why he had been in such a condition. It came out at last that he had really been asleep and had had a very odd disjointed sort of dream. He never saw much of what was around him, but he felt the scenes most vividly.

  “First he made out that he was standing in a large room with a number of people in it, and that someone was opposite to him who was ‘very powerful,’ and he was being asked questions which he felt to be very important, and, whenever he answered them, someone—either the person opposite to him, or someone else in the room—seemed to be, as he said, making something up against him.

  “All the voices sounded to him very distant, but he remembered bits of the things that were said: ‘Where were you on the 19th of October?’ and ‘Is this your handwriting?’ and so on.

  “I can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial. But we were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that a boy of eight should have such a vivid idea of what went on in a court. All the time he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and hopelessness (though I don’t suppose he used such words as that to me).

  “Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there came another sort of picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark raw morning with a little snow about.

  “It was in a street, or at any rate among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps and stood on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could actually see was a small fire burning somewhere near him.

  “Someone who had been holding his arm left hold of it and went toward this fire, and then he said the fright he was in was worse than at any other part of his dream, and if I had not wakened him up he didn’t know what would have become of him.

  “A curious dream for a child to have, wasn’t it? Well, so much for that. It must have been later in the year that Frank and I were here, and I was sitting in the arbor just about sunset. I noticed the sun was going down, and told Frank to run in and see if tea was ready while I finished a chapter in the book I was reading.

  “Frank was away longer than I expected, and the light was going so fast that I had to bend over my book to make it out. All at once I became conscious that someone was whispering to me inside the arbor. The only words I could distinguish, or thought I could, were something like ‘Pull, pull. I’ll push, you pull.’

  “I started up in something of a fright. The voice—it was little more than a whisper—sounded so hoarse and angry, and yet as if it came from a long, long way off—just as it had done in Frank’s dream. But, though I was startled, I had enough courage to look around and try to make out where the sound came from.

  “And—this sounds very foolish, I know, but still it is the fact—I made sure that it was strongest when I put my ear to an old post which was part of the end of the seat. I was so certain of this that I remember making some marks on the post—as deep as I could with the scissors out of my work-basket. I don’t know why.

  “I wonder, by the way, whether that isn’t the very post itself … Well, yes, it might be: there are marks and scratches on it—but one can’t be sure. Anyhow, it was just like that post you have there. My father got to know that both of us had had a fright in the arbor, and he went down there himself one evening after dinner, and the arbor was pulled down at very short notice.

  “I recollect hearing my father talking about it to an old man who used to do odd jobs in the place, and the old man saying, ‘Don’t you fear for that, sir: he’s fast enough in there without no one don’t take and let him out.’ But when I asked who it was, I could get no satisfactory answer. Possibly my father or mother might have told me more about it when I grew up, but, as you know, they both died when we were still quite children.

  “I must say it has always seemed very odd to me, and I’ve often asked the older people in the village whether they knew of anything strange. But either they knew nothing or they wouldn’t tell me.

  “Dear, dear, how I have been boring you with my childish remembrances! But indeed that arbor did absorb our thoughts quite remarkably for a time. You can fancy, can’t you, the kind of stories that we made up for ourselves.

  “Well, dear Mrs. Anstruther, I must be leaving you now. We shall meet in town this winter, I hope, won’t we?” etc., etc.

  The seats and the post were cleared away and uprooted respectively by that evening. Late summer weather is proverbially treacherous, and during dinner-time Mrs. Collins sent up to ask for a little brandy, because her husband had took a nasty chill and she was afraid he would not be able to do much next day.

  Mrs. Anstruther’s morning reflections were not wholly placid. She was sure some roughs had gotten into the plantation during the night. “And another thing, George: the moment that Collins is about again, you must tell him to do something about the owls. I never heard anything like them, and I’m positive one came and perched somewhere just outside our window.

  “If it had come in I should have been out of my wits: it must have been a very large bird, from its voice. Didn’t you hear it? No, of course not, you were sound asleep as usual. Still, I must say, George, you don’t look as if your night had done you much good.”

  “My dear, I feel as if another of the same would turn me silly. You have no idea of the dreams I had. I couldn’t speak of them when I woke up, and if this room wasn’t so bright and sunny I shouldn’t care to think of them even now.”

  “Well, really, George, that isn’t very common with you, I must say. You must have—no, you only had what I had yesterday—unless you had tea at that wretched club-house. Did you?”

  “No, no; nothing but a cup of tea and some bread and butter. I should really like to know how I came to put my dream together—as I suppose one does put one’s dreams together from a lot of little things one has been seeing or reading. Look here, Mary, it was like this—if I won’t be boring you—”

  “I wish to hear what it was, George. I will tell you when I have had enough.”

  “All right. I must tell you that it wasn’t like other nightmares in one way, because I didn’t really see anyone who spoke to me or touched me, and yet I was most fearfully impressed with the reality of it all.

  “First I was sitting, no, moving about, in an old-fashioned sort of paneled room. I remember there was a fireplace and a lot of burned papers in it, and I was in a great state of anxiety about something. There was someone else—a servant, I suppose, because I remember saying to him, ‘Horses, as quick as you can,’ and then waiting a bit. And next I heard several people coming upstairs and a noise like spurs on a boarded floor, and then the door opened and whatever it was that I was expecting happened.”

  “Yes, but what was that?”

  “You see, I couldn’t tell: it was the sort of shock that upsets you in a dream. You either wake up or else everything goes black. That was what happened to me.

  “Then I was in a big dark-walled room, paneled, I think, like the other, and a number of people, and I was evidently—”

  “Standing your trial, I suppose, George.”

  “Goodness! Yes, Mary, I was. But did you dream that too? How very odd!”

  “No, no. I didn’t get enough sleep for that. Go on, George, and I will tell you afterward.”

  “Yes. Well, I was being tried, for my life, I’ve no doubt, from the state I was in. I had no one speaking for me, and somewhere there was a most fearful fellow on the bench, I should have said, only that he seemed to be p
itching into me most unfairly, and twisting everything I said, and asking most abominable questions.”

  “What about?”

  “Why, dates when I was at particular places, and letters I was supposed to have written, and why I had destroyed some papers. And I recollect his laughing at answers I made in a way that quite daunted me. It doesn’t sound much, but I can tell you, Mary, it was really appalling at the time. I am quite certain there was such a man once, and a most horrible villain he must have been. The things he said—”

  “Thank you, I have no wish to hear them. I can go to the links any day myself. How did it end?”

  “Oh, against me. He saw to that. I do wish, Mary, I could give you a notion of the strain that came after that, and seemed to me to last for days: waiting and waiting, and sometimes writing things I knew to be enormously important to me, and waiting for answers and none coming, and after that I came out—”

  “Ah!”

  “What makes you say that? Do you know what sort of thing I saw?”

  “Was it a dark cold day, and snow in the streets, and a fire burning somewhere near you?”

  “By George, it was! You have had the same nightmare! Really not? Well, it is the oddest thing! Yes. I’ve no doubt it was an execution for high treason. I know I was laid on straw and jolted along most wretchedly, and then had to go up some steps, and someone was holding my arm, and I remember seeing a bit of a ladder and hearing a sound of a lot of people. I really don’t think I could bear now to go into a crowd of people and hear the noise they make talking. However, mercifully, I didn’t get to the real business. The dream passed off with a sort of thunder inside my head. But, Mary—”

  “I know what you are going to ask. I suppose this is an instance of a kind of thought-reading. Miss Wilkins called yesterday and told me of a dream her brother had as a child when they lived here, and something did no doubt make me think of that when I was awake last night listening to those horrible owls and those men talking and laughing in the shrubbery (by the way, I wish you would see if they have done any damage, and speak to the police about it).