Mr Dobree was as bold as a lion. He sate up in bed and shouted out in his great voice. EH, WHAT? HOLLA-HO! WHO IS THAT? EH, WHAT DID YOU SAY? WHAT DO YOU THERE, SIRRAH?
His voice reverberated in the little bare room, and died away, leaving a shocking silence. Nothing moved or spoke. He felt for his tinder-box and made a light, and then jumping out of bed, in nightcap and nightgown, looked about everywhere, first in his bedroom, then through his two keeping-rooms, and even in his cupboards, but he saw no sign of anything living. After some time he went back to bed, but not to sleep. He was angry with himself for being afraid, and half suspected a trick; but his door was firmly latched, and no one seemed to have come in that way, while the windows into the court were safely shuttered.
In the morning, after a draught of small beer, which he used for his breakfast, and when he had made his toilet, he felt better; but for all that he wished for company, and made his way to Mr Janeway’s rooms in the second Court as soon as might be. He found Mr Janeway reading in a book, with coffee beside him, and sitting down he told him his adventure rather shamefacedly. Mr Janeway nodded his head and said very little, save this, that he too, when his stomach was at all disordered, suffered from disturbing dreams. ‘A little sick fancy, no doubt!’ he added comfortably.
‘It may be!’ said Mr Dobree moodily; ‘But I think there was someone with me in the room. Yet what sticks even more in my mind was a dream I had dreamed, which I cannot fully recall.’
‘What was it like?’ said Mr Janeway.
‘What was it?’ said Mr Dobree; ‘That I cannot quite tell—but it was an ill dream. I was in a dull place, methought between buildings. They were buildings, I believe; and a dark sort of thing poked its head out in front of me in an ugly way. It seems to me now that it had on a parti-coloured robe, of black or white, or both—like a gown, and like a surplice. There was something drawn over the head of it; and the face was very white; now, as I think of it, I believe it had no eyes; it said something to me, which still sounds in my ears like Latin, in a very low voice; and it seemed to be angry—Yes, Sir, it was angry, was that person!’
‘Dear now!’ said Mr Janeway, looking over his glasses at Mr Dobree, ‘That’s a bad story and a confused story! Is it your way to dream like that, Mr Dobree? It seems to me a dark affair.’
‘Why, Sir!’ said Mr Dobree with a sudden anger, ‘It appears to me that you are but very poor company this morning! I come to my old friend to be made cheer with, and you can only shake your head and look dismal. This is not friendly, Sir! You are not speaking your mind!’
‘Nay, Sir.’ said Mr Janeway, ‘Be not so peevish! There is something that presses upon my spirits, since you spoke your dream, and I am grown very heavy. You must think no more of it, Sir. It was but a touch of vapours, such as comes to us lonely men, as we get older and more solitary.’
Mr Dobree got up, shaking his head and looking very sullen, and marched off without a word. He went about his business as usual, but he found himself day by day in a disordered mood. He ate little and spoke not at all, though he had been ever ready with his tongue. He slept brokenly; and presently as he sate alone in his room, he began to hear whispers in his ear, or he would think that he was called; and his brother Fellows began to be concerned about him, wondering why he peered so often into the corners of the room, and why he wheeled round so sharply in the street to look behind him as he walked alone.
It was a very wet and dull afternoon at the end of November, and Mr Dobree had sate all day indoors. Just about dusk he remembered that he had a word to say to the stonemason who worked for the College, about some tiling on the roof. He went out of his rooms and found the whole place very still, with a light rain falling. He walked out of the gate, and turned to the left at once, down the lane that ran close by the College, the stonemason’s yard being at the end of it, by the water’s edge.
When he got there he found the mason with a lantern in his hand looking about among some piled-up stones in the yard. Mr Dobree went to speak to him, and broke off in the middle. He felt very much displeased to see what was evidently the head-piece of the old stone coffin lying on the ground. ‘How comes that there?’ he said with a sudden sharpness. ‘Why, Sir’ said the mason ‘You ordered me to take it and break it all up, and it has lain there ever since.’ ‘What is that which lies inside it?’ said Mr Dobree in a loud voice. The mason turned his lantern on the piece. It was roughly worked, the strokes of the chisel being visible where the head had lain, and it was pierced with a hole, the use of which Mr Dobree did not like to guess. ‘There is nothing here!’ said the mason. ‘No,’ said Mr Dobree, ‘There is not—I see plainly now. I was dazzled—It was but the shadow. Yet I certainly thought . . .’ He broke off, turned on his heel and went away, the business being still unsettled. The mason stood, lantern in hand, watching him as he marched out of the yard. Then he shook his head, and went into the house.
A moment later Mr Dobree was hurrying up the lane. It was very dark, and the rain kept all men at home. On his right, the wall of the College towered up in the misty air, and he could see a few lighted windows, very high above. The houses on his left seemed all dark and comfortless. He went on until he was close outside his own rooms, which lay next the street.
Drawing by Stella Hender
Suddenly out of the window of his own bedroom, just above him, not a yard away, there came with a silent haste the head and shoulders of a man, wrapped up, it seemed to Mr Dobree, in a parti-coloured robe, black and white, with a hood over the face, but the face itself was visible, a dead yellow-white, like baked clay, with holes for eyes. There came a faint, thin voice upon the air, and words that sounded in Mr Dobree’s agonised ears like ‘Quare inquietasti me ut suscitarer?’[2] But Mr Dobree heard no more. He fell all his length in the wet road, and presently turned over on his back, where they afterwards found him, still looking upwards.
THE SLYPE HOUSE
A. C. Benson
M. R. James was only a few weeks younger than Arthur Christopher Benson, and followed close behind him in an identical path through Temple Grove Preparatory School, Eton, and King’s College, Cambridge. James even succeeded Benson in the two same sets of rooms at King’s, and many years later he wrote movingly in the Benson memorial volume (1925) of his ‘old and beloved friend who has, for over fifty years, been a part of one’s life’. Benson began writing short stones at the same time that James was embarking on his Ghost Stones of an Antiquary, and published two much-admired collections, The Hill of Trouble (1903) and The Isles of Sunset (1905). The tale we have selected comes from the latter volume.
In the town of Garchester, close to St Peter’s Church, and near the river, stood a dark old house called the Slype House, from a narrow passage of that name that ran close to it, down to a bridge over the stream. The house showed a front of mouldering and discoloured stone to the street, pierced by small windows, like a monastery; and indeed, it was formerly inhabited by a college of priests who had served the Church. It abutted at one angle upon the aisle of the church, and there was a casement window that looked out from a room in the house, formerly the infirmary, into the aisle; it had been so built that any priest that was sick might hear the Mass from his bed, without descending into the church. Behind the house lay a little garden, closely grown up with trees and tall weeds, that ran down to the stream. In the wall that gave on the water, was a small door that admitted to an old timbered bridge that crossed the stream, and had a barred gate on the further side, which was rarely seen open; though if a man had watched attentively he might sometimes have seen a small lean person, much bowed and with a halting gait, slip out very quietly about dusk, and walk, with his eyes cast down, among the shadowy byways.