Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (43 page)

“‘No, Worby,’ says the Dean, ‘that’s Southminster Cathedral as we hope to see it before many years.’

“‘Indeed, sir,’ says my father, and that was all he did say—leastways to the Dean—but he used to tell me he felt really faint in himself when he looked around our choir as I can remember it, comfortable, and furnished-like, and then see this nasty little dry picter, as he called it, drawn out by some London architect.

“Well, there I am again. But you’ll see what I mean if you look at this old view.”

Worby reached down a framed print from the wall. ‘Well, the long and the short of it was that the Dean he handed over to my father a copy of
an order of the Chapter that he was to clear out every bit of the choir—make a clean sweep—ready for the new work that was being designed up in town, and he was to put it in hand as soon as ever he could get the breakers together.

“Now then, sir, if you look at that view, You’ll see where the pulpit used to stand—that’s what I want you to notice, if you please.”

It was, indeed, easily seen; an unusually large structure of timber with a domed sounding-board, standing at the east end of the stalls on the north side of the choir, facing the bishop’s throne.

Worby proceeded to explain that during the alterations, services were held in the nave, the member of the choir being thereby disappointed of an anticipated holiday, and the organist in particular incurring the suspicion of having willfully damaged the mechanism of the temporary organ that was hired at considerable expense from London.

The work of demolition began with the choir screen and organ loft, and proceeded gradually east-wards, disclosing, as Worby said, many interesting features of older work.

While this was going on, the members of the Chapter were, naturally, in and about the choir a great deal, and it soon became apparent to the elder Worby—who could not help overhearing some of their talk—that, on the part of the senior Canons especially, there must have been a good deal of disagreement before the policy now being carried out had been adopted.

Some were of opinion that they should catch their deaths of cold in the return-stalls, unprotected by a screen from the drafts in the nave; others objected to being exposed to the view of persons in the choir aisles, especially, they said, during the sermons, when they found it helpful to listen in a posture which was liable to misconstruction.

The strongest opposition, however, came from the oldest of the body, who up to the last moment objected to the removal of the pulpit. “You ought not to touch it, Mr. Dean,” he said with great emphasis one morning, when the two were standing before it. “You don’t know what mischief you may do.”

“Mischief? It’s not a work of any particular merit, Canon.”

“Don’t call me Canon,” said the old man with great asperity, “that is, for thirty years I’ve been known as Dr. Ayloff, and I shall be obliged, Mr. Dean, if you would kindly humor me in that matter. And as to the pulpit (which
I’ve preached from for thirty years, though I don’t insist on that), all I’ll say is, I
know
you’re doing wrong in moving it.”

“But what sense could there be, my dear Doctor, in leaving it where it is, when we’re fitting up the rest of the choir in a totally different
style
? What reason could be given—apart from the look of the thing?”

“Reason! Reason!” said old Dr. Ayloff. “If you young men—if I may say so without any disrespect, Mr. Dean—if you’d only listen to reason a little, and not be always asking for it, we should get on better. But there, I’ve said my say.”

The old gentleman hobbled off, and as it proved, never entered the Cathedral again.

The season—it was a hot summer—turned sickly on a sudden, Dr. Ayloff was one of the first to go, with some affection of the muscles of the thorax, which took him painfully at night. And at many services the number of choir-men and boys was very thin.

Meanwhile the pulpit had been done away with. In fact, the sounding-board (part of which still exists as a table in a summer-house in the palace garden) was taken down within an hour or two of Dr. Ayloff’s protest. The removal of the base—not effected without considerable trouble—disclosed to view, greatly to the exultation of the restoring party, an altar-tomb—the tomb, of course, to which Worby had attracted Lake’s attention that same evening.

Much fruitless research was expended in attempts to identify the occupant; from that day to this he has never had a name put to him. The structure had been most carefully boxed in under the pulpit-base, so that such slight ornament as it possessed was not defaced. Only on the north side of it there was what looked like an injury—a gap between two of the slabs composing the side. It might be two or three inches across.

Palmer, the mason, was directed to fill it up in a week’s time, when he came to do some other small jobs near that part of the choir.

The season was undoubtedly a very trying one. Whether the church was built on a site that had once been a marsh, as was suggested, or for whatever reason, the residents in its immediate neighborhood had, many of them, but little enjoyment of the exquisite sunny days and the calm nights of August and September.

To several of the older people—Dr. Ayloff, among others, as we have
seen—the summer proved downright fatal, but even among the younger, few escaped either a sojourn in bed for a matter of weeks, or at the least, a brooding sense of oppression, accompanied by hateful nightmares.

Gradually there formulated itself a suspicion—which grew into a conviction—that the alterations in the Cathedral had something to say in the matter. The widow of a former old verger, a pensioner of the Chapter of Southminster, was visited by dreams, which she retailed to her friends, of a shape that slipped out of the little door of the south transept as the dark fell in, and flitted—taking a fresh direction every night—about the Close, disappearing for a while in house after house, and finally emerging again when the night sky was paling.

She could see nothing of it, she said, but that it was a moving form—only she had an impression that when it returned to the church, as it seemed to do in the end of the dream, it turned its head. And then, she could not tell why, but she thought it had red eyes.

Worby remembered hearing the old lady tell this dream at a tea-party in the house of the chapter clerk. Its recurrence might, perhaps, he said, be taken as a symptom of approaching illness. At any rate before the end of September the old lady was in her grave.

The interest excited by the restoration of this great church was not confined to its own county. One day that summer an F.S.A., of some celebrity, visited the place. His business was to write an account of the discoveries that had been made, for the Society of Antiquaries, and his wife, who accompanied him, was to make a series of illustrative drawings for his report.

In the morning she employed herself in making a general sketch of the choir; in the afternoon she devoted herself to details. She first drew the newly-exposed altar-tomb, and when that was finished, she called her husband’s attention to a beautiful piece of diaper-ornament on the screen just behind it, which had, like the tomb itself, been completely concealed by the pulpit.

Of course, he said, an illustration of that must be made. So she seated herself on the tomb and began a careful drawing which occupied her till dusk.

Her husband had by this time finished his work of measuring and description, and they agreed that it was time to be getting back to their hotel. “You may as well brush my skirt, Frank,” said the, lady, “it must have got covered with dust, I’m sure.”

He obeyed dutifully. But, after a moment, he said, “I don’t know whether you value this dress particularly, my dear, but I’m inclined to think it’s seen its best days. There’s a great bit of it gone.”

“Gone? Where?” said she.

“I don’t know where it’s gone, but it’s off at the bottom edge behind here.”

She pulled it hastily into sight, and was horrified to find a jagged tear extending some way into the substance of the stuff, very much, she said, as if a dog had rent it away. The dress was, in any case, hopelessly spoiled, to her great vexation, and though they looked everywhere, the missing piece could not be found.

There were many ways, they concluded, in which the injury might have come about, for the choir was full of old bits of woodwork with nails sticking out of them. Finally, they could only suppose that one of these had caused the mischief, and that the workmen, who had been about all day, had carried off the particular piece with the fragment of dress still attached to it.

It was about this time, Worby thought, that his little dog began to wear an anxious expression when the hour for it to be put into the shed in the back yard approached. (For his mother had ordained that it must not sleep in the house.)

One evening, he said, when he was just going to pick it up and carry it out, it looked at him “like a Christian, and waved its ’and, I was going to say—well, you know ’ow they do carry on sometimes, and the end of it was I put it under my coat, and ’uddled it upstairs—and I’m afraid I as good as deceived my poor mother on the subject. After that the dog acted very artful with ’iding itself under the bed for half-an-hour or more before bedtime came, and we worked it so as my mother never found out what we’d done.”

Of course Worby was glad of its company anyhow, but more particularly when the nuisance that is still remembered in Southminster as “the crying” set in.

“Night after night,” said Worby, “that dog seemed to know it was coming—he’d creep out, he would, and snuggle into the bed and cuddle right up to me shivering, and when the crying come he’d be like a wild thing, shoving his head under my arm, and I was fully near as bad.

“Six or seven times we’d hear it, not more, and when he’d dror out his ’ed again I’d know it was over for that night. What was it like, sir? Well, I never heard but one thing that seemed to hit it off.

“I happened to be playing about in the Close, and there was two of the Canons met and said ‘Good morning’ one to another.

“‘Sleep well last night?’ says one—it was Mr. Henslow that one, and Mr. Lyall was the other.

“‘Can’t say I did,’ says Mr. Lyall, ‘rather too much of Isaiah xxxiv. 14 for me.’

“‘Xxxiv. 14,’ says Mr. Henslow, ‘what’s that?’

“‘You call yourself a Bible reader!’ says Mr. Lyall. (Mr. Henslow, you must know, he was one of what used to be termed Simeon’s lot—pretty much what we should call the Evangelical party.) ‘You go and look it up.’

“I wanted to know what he was getting at myself, and so off I ran home and got out my own Bible, and there it was: ‘the satyr shall cry to his fellow.’ Well, I thought, is that what we’ve been listening to these past nights? And I tell you it made me look over my shoulder a time or two.

“Of course I’d asked my father and mother about what it could be before that, but they both said it was most likely cats, but they spoke very short, and I could see they was troubled. My word! That was a noise—’ungry-like, as if it was calling after someone that wouldn’t come. If ever you felt you wanted company, it would be when you was waiting for it to begin again.

“I believe two or three nights there was men put on to watch in different parts of the Close, but they all used to get together in one corner, the nearest they could to the High Street, and nothing came of it.

“Well, the next thing was this. Me and another of the boys—he’s in business in the city now as a grocer, like his father before him—we’d gone up in the choir after morning service was over, and we heard old Palmer the mason bellowing to some of his men. So we went up nearer, because we knew he was a rusty old chap and there might be some fun going.

“It appears Palmer ’d told this man to stop up the chink in that old tomb. Well, there was this man keeping on saying he’d done it the best he could, and there was Palmer carrying on like all possessed about it.

“‘Call that making a job of it?’ he says. ‘If you had your rights you’d get the sack for this. What do you suppose I pay you your wages for? What do
you suppose I’m going to say to the Dean and Chapter when they come round, as come they may do any time, and see where you’ve been bungling about covering the ’ole place with mess and plaster and Lord knows what?’

“‘Well, master, I done the best I could,’ says the man. ‘I don’t know no more than what you do ’ow it come to fall out this way. I tamped it right in the ’ole,’ he says, ‘and how it’s fell out,’ he says, ‘I never see.’

“‘Fell out?’ says old Palmer, ‘why it’s nowhere near the place. Blowed out, you mean,’ and he picked up a bit of plaster, and so did I, that was laying up against the screen, three or four feet off, and not dry yet. And old Palmer he looked at it curious-like, and then he turned around to me and he says, ‘Now then, you boys, have you been up to some of your games here?’

“‘No,’ I says, ‘I haven’t, Mr. Palmer. There’s none of us been about here till just this minute.’

“And while I was talking the other boy, Evans, he got looking in through the chink, and I heard him draw in his breath, and he came away sharp and up to us, and says he, ‘I believe there’s something in there. I saw something shiny.’

“‘What! I dare say!’ says old Palmer. ‘Well, I ain’t got time to stop about there. You, William, you go off and get some more stuff and make a job of it this time; if not, there’ll be trouble in my yard,’ he says.

“So the man he went off, and Palmer too, and us boys stopped behind, and I says to Evans, ‘Did you really see anything in there?’

“‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I did indeed.’

“So then I says, ‘Let’s shove something in and stir it up.’

“And we tried several of the bits of wood that was laying about, but they were all too big. Then Evans he had a sheet of music he’d brought with him, an anthem or a service, I forget which it was now, and he rolled it up small and shoved it in the chink. Two or three times he did it, and nothing happened.

“‘Give it me, boy,’ I said, and I had a try.

“No, nothing happened. Then, I don’t know why I thought of it, I’m sure, but I stooped down just opposite the chink and put my two fingers in my mouth and whistled—you know the way—and at that I seemed to think I heard something stirring, and I says to Evans, ‘Come away,’ I says. ‘I don’t like this.’