(Thunderclap)
(Chimes)
(Howling wind)
(Thunderclap)
Two men in a smoking room were talking of their private school days.
'At our school,' said one, '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.
I never heard any story about the thing, which seems odd.
Why didn't someone invent one, I wonder?'
'You can never tell with boys,' said the other,
'they have a mythology of their own.'
'I imagine if you were to investigate the cycle of ghost stories
which boys tell each other,
they'd all turn out to be highly compressed versions of stories out of books.
You never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school?
I thought not. Nobody has that I ever came across.'
'The way you said that, I gathered 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.
I haven't any explanation of it.
The school 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 and some ancient elms
in the three or four fields which we used for our games.
I came to the school in the September soon after the year 1870.
Among the boys who arrived on the same day was one whom I took to,
a Highland boy whom I'll call McLeod.
I got to know him very well.
The school was a large one,
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'd travelled a good deal and had stories which amused us
on our school walks,
I remember that he had a charm on his watch chain
that attracted my attention one day and he let me examine it.
It was a gold Byzantine coin,
with an effigy of some emperor on one side.
The other side had been worn practically smooth,
and he had cut on it his own initials, GWS,
and a date, July 24th, 1865.
Yes, I can see it now.
He told me he'd picked it up in Constantinople.
Well, the first odd thing that happened was this...
Sampson was doing Latin grammar with us.
One of his favourite methods was to make us construct sentences
out of our own heads to illustrate the rules he was trying to make us learn.
On this occasion, he was telling us how to express "remembering" in Latin.
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 something equally uninteresting.
But the boy I mentioned, McLeod,
was evidently thinking of something much more elaborate
because when I looked at his paper, I saw he'd put down nothing at all
and hardly seemed to be attending.
We all wanted to get on to something else, which did seem to have some effect,
because he very quickly scribbled a couple of lines on his paper
and handed it in.
The clock was striking twelve before Sampson got to McLeod's paper,
so he had to wait behind to have the sentence corrected.
I decided to wait for him, but when at last he did arrive
I guessed there must have been some sort of trouble.
"I think Sampson's rather sick with me," he said.
"I put: memento putei inter quatuor taxos.
It was all right, as far as I could see."
"What does it mean?" I said.
"That's the funny part, I don't know. It just came into my head.
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...'
Erm... Oh what are those dark trees that have red berries on them?
Yes, I know, yews.
Anyway, when Sampson read it, he got up
and went to the mantelpiece without saying anything.
He stood there quite a long time with his back to me,
and then, without turning round, he said:
'What do you suppose that means?'
I told him what I thought, only I couldn't remember the name of the silly trees.
Then he wanted to know why I'd put it down.
I had to say something or other...
After that, he left off talking about it and asked me
how long I'd been at the school and where I lived, things like that.
Then I came away."
The next day, McLeod took to his bed with a chill or something,
and it was more than a week before he was back in school again.
Then about a month later, there was another incident.
We were going through those dismal things
which people call conditional sentences.
We were told to make a conditional sentence
expressing a future consequence.
We did it and showed our bits of paper to Sampson
who began to look through them.
All at once, he got up, made some odd sort of noise in his throat
and rushed out by the door which was just by his desk.
We sat there for a minute.
Then we went up to look at the papers still lying there.
The top one was written in red ink,
which no one in the class ever used.
We all looked at it, including McLeod,
and all took their dying oaths that it wasn't theirs.
Then I thought of counting the bits of paper.
There were seventeen on the desk,
and sixteen boys in the form.
I bagged the extra paper and kept it, and I believe I still have it now.
What was written on it seemed harmless enough.
'Si Iu non veneris ad me, ego veniam ad 1e. '
Which means, I suppose, "If you don't come to me, I'll come to you."
But there's another odd thing about it.
That same afternoon, I took it out of my locker.
I know for certain it was the same bit because I'd made a finger mark on it.
And no single trace of writing of any kind was there on it.
Anyway, so much for that.
After about half an hour, Sampson looked in again.
He said he'd felt unwell and told us that we might go.
That day was a half holiday and next day Sampson was in school again.
It was on that night that the third and last incident in my story happened.
We, McLeod and I, slept in a dormitory at right angles to the main building.
Sampson slept in the main building on the first floor.
There was a very bright full moon,
and some time before two o'clock, I was woken by someone shaking me.
It was McLeod.
"There's a burglar getting in through Sampson's window."
As soon as I could speak, I said, "Why not wake everybody up?"
"Because I'm not sure who it is," he said.
"Don't make a row, come and look!"
I came and looked. There was no one there.
I was cross enough with McLeod,
yet it seemed to me that there was something wrong,
something that made me very glad I wasn't alone.
"I didn't hear anything at all," he said,
"but about five minutes before I woke you,
I found myself looking out of this window here,
and there was a man sitting or kneeling on Sampson's windowsill and looking in,
and I thought he was beckoning."
"What son of man?" McLeod wriggled, "I don't know!
But he was beastly thin and looked as if he was wet all over."
He glanced round, then whispered, "I'm not at all sure that he was alive."
We went on talking in whispers some time longer,
and eventually crept back to bed.
No one else in the room woke or stirred the whole time.
Next day, Mr Sampson was gone, not to be found.
And I believe no trace of him has ever come to light since.
In thinking it over, one of the oddest things about it all
seemed to me to be the fact that neither McLeod nor I
ever mentioned what we had seen to any third person whatever.
Of course, no questions were asked on the subject,
and if they had been, I'm inclined to believe
that we would not have been able to make any answer.
We seemed unable to speak about it.
That is my story," said the narrator.'
'The only approach to a ghost story connected with the school that I know.
But still, I think, an approach to such a thing.'
The sequel to this may perhaps be reckoned highly conventional,
but a sequel there is, and so it must be produced.
There had been more than one listener to the story,
and in the latter part of that same year
one such listener was staying at a country house in Ireland.
One evening, his host was turning over a drawer full of odds and ends
in the smoking room.
Suddenly, he put his hand upon a little box.
'Now,' he said, 'you know about old things. Tell me what that is.'
My friend opened the little box and found in it a thin gold chain
with an object attached to it.
He glanced at the object and then took off his spectacles
to examine it more narrowly.
'What's the history of this?' he asked.
'Odd enough,' was the answer,
'you know the yew thicket in the shrubbery?
Well, a year or two back, we were cleaning out the well that used to be there,
and what do you suppose we found?'
'ls it possible that you found a body?'
said the visitor with an odd feeling of nervousness.
'We found two.'
'Was this thing found with them?'
'It was. Among the rags of the clothes that were on one of the bodies.
A bad business, whatever the story of it may have been.
One body had the arms tight round the other.
They must have been there thirty years or more.
You may judge, we filled the well up fast enough.
Do you make anything of what's cut on that gold coin you have there?'
My friend held the coin up to the light.
'I think I can,' he said.
'It seems to be GWS,
July 24th, 1865.'