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Title: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
Author: Montague Rhodes James
Release Date: January, 2006 [EBook #9629]
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M.R. JAMES
GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY_These stories are dedicated to all those who at various times have
listened to them._
CONTENTSPART I: GHOST STORIES OF AN ANTIQUARY
Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book
Lost Hearts
The Mezzotint
The Ash-tree
Number 13
Count Magnus
‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas
A School Story
The Rose Garden
The Tractate Middoth
Casting the Runes
The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral
Martin’s Close
Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance
*
The first six of the seven tales were Christmas productions, the very
first (‘A School Story’) having been made up for the benefit of King’s
College Choir School. ‘The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral’ was printed in
Contemporary Review; ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’ was written to
fill up the volume. In ‘A School Story’ I had Temple Grove, East Sheen in
mind; in ‘The Tractate Middoth’, Cambridge University Library; in
‘Martin’s Close’, Sampford Courtenay in Devon. The Cathedral of
Barchester is a blend of Canterbury, Salisbury, and Hereford.
M.R. JAMES
*
A SCHOOL STORYTwo men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. ‘At
our school,’ said A., ‘we had a ghost’s footmark on the staircase. What
was it like? Oh, very unconvincing. Just the shape of a shoe, with a
square toe, if I remember right. The staircase was a stone one. I never
heard any story about the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think
of it. Why didn’t somebody invent one, I wonder?’
‘You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own.
There’s a subject for you, by the way—“The Folklore of Private
Schools”.’
‘Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to
investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at
private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be
highly-compressed versions of stories out of books.’
‘Nowadays the Strand and Pearson’s, and so on, would be extensively
drawn upon.’
‘No doubt: they weren’t born or thought of in my time. Let’s see. I
wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there
was the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing
a night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner,
and had just time to say, “I’ve seen it,” and died.’
‘Wasn’t that the house in Berkeley Square?’
‘I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the
passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him
on all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides,
let me think—Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a
horseshoe mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered
with marks of horseshoes also; I don’t know why. Also there was the lady
who, on locking her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice
among the bed-curtains say, “Now we’re shut in for the night.” None of
those had any explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those
stories.’
‘Oh, likely enough—with additions from the magazines, as I said. You
never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not;
nobody has that ever I came across.’
‘From the way in which you said that, I gather that you have.’
‘I really don’t know; but this is what was in my mind. It happened at my
private school thirty odd years ago, and I haven’t any explanation of it.
‘The school I mean was near London. It was established in a large and
fairly old house—a great white building with very fine grounds about it;
there were large cedars in the garden, as there are in so many of the
older gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four
fields which we used for our games. I think probably it was quite an
attractive place, but boys seldom allow that their schools possess any
tolerable features.
‘I came to the school in a September, soon after the year 1870; and among
the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to: a Highland
boy, whom I will call McLeod. I needn’t spend time in describing him: the
main thing is that I got to know him very well. He was not an exceptional
boy in any way—not particularly good at books or games—but he suited
me.
‘The school was a large one: there must have been from 120 to 130 boys
there as a rule, and so a considerable staff of masters was required, and
there were rather frequent changes among them.
‘One term—perhaps it was my third or fourth—a new master made his
appearance. His name was Sampson. He was a tallish, stoutish, pale,
black-bearded man. I think we liked him: he had travelled a good deal,
and had stories which amused us on our school walks, so that there was
some competition among us to get within earshot of him. I remember
too—dear me, I have hardly thought of it since then!—that he had a
charm on his watch-chain that attracted my attention one day, and he let
me examine it. It was, I now suppose, a gold Byzantine coin; there was an
effigy of some absurd emperor on one side; the other side had been worn
practically smooth, and he had had cut on it—rather barbarously—his own
initials, G.W.S., and a date, 24 July, 1865. Yes, I can see it now: he
told me he had picked it up in Constantinople: it was about the size of a
florin, perhaps rather smaller.
‘Well, the first odd thing that happened was this. Sampson was doing
Latin grammar with us. One of his favourite methods—perhaps it is rather
a good one—was to make us construct sentences out of our own heads to
illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn. Of course that is a
thing which gives a silly boy a chance of being impertinent: there are
lots of school stories in which that happens—or anyhow there might be.
But Sampson was too good a disciplinarian for us to think of trying that
on with him. Now, on this occasion he was telling us how to express
remembering in Latin: and he ordered us each to make a sentence
bringing in the verb memini, “I remember.” Well, most of us made up
some ordinary sentence such as “I remember my father,” or “He remembers
his book,” or something equally uninteresting: and I dare say a good many
put down memino librum meum, and so forth: but the boy I
mentioned—McLeod—was evidently thinking of something more elaborate
than that. The rest of us wanted to have our sentences passed, and get on
to something else, so some kicked him under the desk, and I, who was next
to him, poked him and whispered to him to look sharp. But he didn’t seem
to attend. I looked at his paper and saw he had put down nothing at all.
So I jogged him again harder than before and upbraided him sharply for
keeping us all waiting. That did have some effect. He started and seemed
to wake up, and then very quickly he scribbled about a couple of lines on
his paper, and showed it up with the rest. As it was the last, or nearly
the last, to come in, and as Sampson had a good deal to say to the boys
who had written meminiscimus patri meo and the rest of it, it turned
out that the clock struck twelve before he had got to McLeod, and McLeod
had to wait afterwards to have his sentence corrected. There was nothing
much going on outside when I got out, so I waited for him to come. He
came very slowly when he did arrive, and I guessed there had been some
sort of trouble. “Well,” I said, “what did you get?” “Oh, I don’t know,”
said McLeod, “nothing much: but I think Sampson’s rather sick with me.”
“Why, did you show him up some rot?” “No fear,” he said. “It was all
right as far as I could see: it was like this: Memento—that’s right
enough for remember, and it takes a genitive,—_memento putei inter
quatuor taxos_.” “What silly rot!” I said. “What made you shove that
down? What does it mean?” “That’s the funny part,” said McLeod. “I’m not
quite sure what it does mean. All I know is, it just came into my head
and I corked it down. I know what I think it means, because just before
I wrote it down I had a sort of picture of it in my head: I believe it
means ‘Remember the well among the four’—what are those dark sort of
trees that have red berries on them?” “Mountain ashes, I s’pose you
mean.” “I never heard of them,” said McLeod; “no, I’ll tell you—yews.”
“Well, and what did Sampson say?” “Why, he was jolly odd about it. When
he read it he got up and went to the mantelpiece and stopped quite a long
time without saying anything, with his back to me. And then he said,
without turning round, and rather quiet, ‘What do you suppose that
means?’ I told him what I thought; only I couldn’t remember the name of
the silly tree: and then he wanted to know why I put it down, and I had
to say something or other. And after that he left
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