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 Title: A Neighbour's Landmark
 Author: James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936)
 Date of first publication: 1924 (The Eton Chronic); included in
    "A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories" (1925)
 Edition used as base for this ebook:
    "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James"
    (New York: Longmans, Green;
    London: Edward Arnold, 1931)
    [first edition]
 Date first posted: 17 May 2010
 Date last updated: 17 May 2010
 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #533

 This ebook was produced by:
 David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
 & the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
 at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




A NEIGHBOUR'S LANDMARK


Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing
books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of
accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not pass
a stall, a shop, or even a bedroom-shelf without reading some title,
and if they find themselves in an unfamiliar library, no host need
trouble himself further about their entertainment. The putting of
dispersed sets of volumes together, or the turning right way up on
those which the dusting housemaid has left in an apoplectic condition,
appeals to them as one of the lesser Works of Mercy. Happy in these
employments, and in occasionally opening an eighteenth-century octavo,
to see "what it is all about," and to conclude after five minutes that
it deserves the seclusion it now enjoys, I had reached the middle of a
wet August afternoon at Betton Court----

"You begin in a deeply Victorian manner," I said; "is this to
continue?"

"Remember, if you please," said my friend, looking at me over his
spectacles, "that I am a Victorian by birth and education, and that
the Victorian tree may not unreasonably be expected to bear Victorian
fruit. Further, remember that an immense quantity of clever and
thoughtful Rubbish is now being written about the Victorian age. Now,"
he went on, laying his papers on his knee, "that article, 'The
Stricken Years,' in _The Times_ Literary Supplement the other
day,--able? of course it is able; but, oh! my soul and body, do just
hand it over here, will you? it's on the table by you."

"I thought you were to read me something you had written," I said,
without moving, "but, of course----"

"Yes, I know," he said. "Very well, then, I'll do that first. But I
_should_ like to show you afterwards what I mean. However----" And he
lifted the sheets of paper and adjusted his spectacles.

----at Betton Court, where, generations back, two country-house
libraries had been fused together, and no descendant of either stock
had ever faced the task of picking them over or getting rid of
duplicates. Now I am not setting out to tell of rarities I may have
discovered, of Shakespeare quartos bound up in volumes of political
tracts, or anything of that kind, but of an experience which befell me
in the course of my search--an experience which I cannot either
explain away or fit into the scheme of my ordinary life.

It was, I said, a wet August afternoon, rather windy, rather warm.
Outside the window great trees were stirring and weeping. Between them
were stretches of green and yellow country (for the Court stands high
on a hill-side), and blue hills far off, veiled with rain. Up above
was a very restless and hopeless movement of low clouds travelling
north-west. I had suspended my work--if you call it work--for some
minutes to stand at the window and look at these things, and at the
greenhouse roof on the right with the water sliding off it, and the
Church tower that rose behind that. It was all in favour of my going
steadily on; no likelihood of a clearing up for hours to come. I,
therefore, returned to the shelves, lifted out a set of eight or nine
volumes, lettered "Tracts," and conveyed them to the table for closer
examination.

They were for the most part of the reign of Anne. There was a good
deal of _The Late Peace, The Late War, The Conduct of the Allies_:
there were also _Letters to a Convocation Man_; _Sermons preached at
St. Michael's, Queenhithe_; _Enquiries into a late Charge of the Rt.
Rev. the Lord Bishop of Winchester_ (or more probably Winton) _to his
Clergy_: things all very lively once, and indeed still keeping so much
of their old sting that I was tempted to betake myself into an
arm-chair in the window, and give them more time than I had intended.
Besides, I was somewhat tired by the day. The Church clock struck
four, and it really was four, for in 1889 there was no saving of
daylight.

So I settled myself. And first I glanced over some of the War
pamphlets, and pleased myself by trying to pick out Swift by his style
from among the undistinguished. But the War pamphlets needed more
knowledge of the geography of the Low Countries than I had. I turned
to the Church, and read several pages of what the Dean of Canterbury
said to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge on the occasion
of their anniversary meeting in 1711. When I turned over to a Letter
from a Beneficed Clergyman in the Country to the Bishop of C . . . .r,
I was becoming languid, and I gazed for some moments at the following
sentence without surprise:

"This Abuse (for I think myself justified in calling it by that name)
is one which I am persuaded Your Lordship would (if 'twere known to
you) exert your utmost efforts to do away. But I am also persuaded
that you know no more of its existence than (in the words of the
Country Song)


    'That which walks in Betton Wood
     Knows why it walks or why it cries.'"


Then indeed I did sit up in my chair, and run my finger along the
lines to make sure that I had read them right. There was no mistake.
Nothing more was to be gathered from the rest of the pamphlet. The
next paragraph definitely changed the subject: "But I have said enough
upon this _Topick_," were its opening words. So discreet, too, was the
namelessness of the Beneficed Clergyman that he refrained even from
initials, and had his letter printed in London.

The riddle was of a kind that might faintly interest anyone: to me,
who have dabbled a good deal in works of folk-lore, it was really
exciting. I was set upon solving it--on finding out, I mean, what
story lay behind it; and, at least, I felt myself lucky in one point,
that, whereas I might have come on the paragraph in some College
Library far away, here I was at Betton, on the very scene of action.

The Church clock struck five, and a single stroke on a gong followed.
This, I knew, meant tea. I heaved myself out of the deep chair, and
obeyed the summons.

My host and I were alone at the Court. He came in soon, wet from a
round of landlord's errands, and with pieces of local news which had
to be passed on before I could make an opportunity of asking whether
there was a particular place in the parish that was still known as
Betton Wood.

"Betton Wood," he said, "was a short mile away, just on the crest of
Betton Hill, and my father stubbed up the last bit of it when it paid
better to grow corn than scrub oaks. Why do you want to know about
Betton Wood?"

"Because," I said, "in an old pamphlet I was reading just now, there
are two lines of a country song which mention it, and they sound as if
there was a story belonging to them. Someone says that someone else
knows no more of whatever it may be--


    'Than that which walks in Betton Wood
     Knows why it walks or why it cries.'"


"Goodness," said Philipson, "I wonder whether that was why . . . I
must ask old Mitchell." He muttered something else to himself, and
took some more tea, thoughtfully.

"Whether that was why----?" I said.

"Yes, I was going to say, whether that was why my father had the Wood
stubbed up. I said just now it was to get more plough-land, but I
don't really know if it was. I don't believe he ever broke it up: it's
rough pasture at this moment. But there's one old chap at least who'd
remember something of it--old Mitchell." He looked at his watch.
"Blest if I don't go down there and ask him. I don't think I'll take
you," he went on; "he's not so likely to tell anything he thinks is
odd if there's a stranger by."

"Well, mind you remember every single thing he does tell. As for me,
if it clears up, I shall go out, and if it doesn't, I shall go on with
the books."

It did clear up, sufficiently at least to make me think it worth while
to walk up the nearest hill and look over the country. I did not know
the lie of the land; it was the first visit I had paid to Philipson,
and this was the first day of it. So I went down the garden and
through the wet shrubberies with a very open mind, and offered no
resistance to the indistinct impulse--was it, however, so very
indistinct?--which kept urging me to bear to the left whenever there
was a forking of the path. The result was that after ten minutes or
more of dark going between dripping rows of box and laurel and privet,
I was confronted by a stone arch in the Gothic style set in the stone
wall which encircled the whole demesne. The door was fastened by a
spring-lock, and I took the precaution of leaving this on the jar as I
passed out into the road. That road I crossed, and entered a narrow
lane between hedges which led upward; and that lane I pursued at a
leisurely pace for as much as half a mile, and went on to the field to
which it led. I was now on a good point of vantage for taking in the
situation of the Court, the village, and the environment; and I leant
upon a gate and gazed westward and downward.

I think we must all know the landscapes--are they by Birket Foster, or
somewhat earlier?--which, in the form of wood-cuts, decorate the
volumes of poetry that lay on the drawing-room tables of our fathers
and grandfathers--volumes in "Art Cloth, embossed bindings"; that
strikes me as being the right phrase. I confess myself an admirer of
them, and especially of those which show the peasant leaning over a
gate in a hedge and surveying, at the bottom of a downward slope, the
village church spire--embosomed amid venerable trees, and a fertile
plain intersected by hedgerows, and bounded by distant hills, behind
which the orb of day is sinking (or it may be rising) amid level
clouds illumined by his dying (or nascent) ray. The expressions
employed here are those which seem appropriate to the pictures I have
in mind; and were there opportunity, I would try to work in the Vale,
the Grove, the Cot, and the Flood. Anyhow, they are beautiful to me,
these landscapes, and it was just such a one that I was now
surveying. It might have come straight out of "Gems of Sacred Song,
selected by a Lady" and given as a birthday present to Eleanor
Philipson in 1852 by her attached friend Millicent Graves. All at once
I turned as if I had been stung. There thrilled into my right ear and
pierced my head a note of incredible sharpness, like the shriek of a
bat, only ten times intensified--the kind of thing that makes one
wonder if something has not given way in one's brain. I held my
breath, and covered my ear, and shivered. Something in the
circulation: another minute or two, I thought, and I return home. But
I must fix the view a little more firmly in my mind. Only, when I
turned to it again, the taste was gone out of it. The sun was down
behind the hill, and the light was off the fields, and when the clock
bell in the Church tower struck seven, I thought no longer of kind
mellow evening hours of rest, and scents of flowers and woods on
evening air; and of how someone on a farm a mile or two off would be
saying "How clear Betton bell sounds to-night after the rain!"; but
instead images came to me of dusty beams and creeping spiders and
savage owls up in the tower, and forgotten graves and their ugly
contents below, and of flying Time and all it had taken out of my
life. And just then into my left ear--close as if lips had been put
within an inch of my head, the frightful scream came thrilling again.

There was no mistake possible now. It _was_ from outside. "With no
language but a cry" was the thought that flashed into my mind. Hideous
it was beyond anything I had heard or have heard since, but I could
read no emotion in it, and doubted if I could read any intelligence.
All its effect was to take away every vestige, every possibility, of
enjoyment, and make this no place to stay in one moment more. Of
course there was nothing to be seen: but I was convinced that, if I
waited, the thing would pass me again on its aimless, endless beat,
and I could not bear the notion of a third repetition. I hurried back
to the lane and down the hill. But when I came to the arch in the wall
I stopped. Could I be sure of my way among those dank alleys, which
would be danker and darker now! No, I confessed to myself that I was
afraid: so jarred were all my nerves with the cry on the hill that I
really felt I could not afford to be startled even by a little bird in
a bush, or a rabbit. I followed the road which followed the wall, and
I was not sorry when I came to the gate and the lodge, and descried
Philipson coming up towards it from the direction of the village.

"And where have you been?" said he.

"I took that lane that goes up the hill opposite the stone arch in the
wall."

"Oh! did you? Then you've been very near where Betton Wood used to be:
at least, if you followed it up to the top, and out into the field."

And if the reader will believe it, that was the first time that I put
two and two together. Did I at once tell Philipson what had happened
to me? I did not. I have not had other experiences of the kind which
are called super-natural, or -normal, or -physical, but, though I knew
very well I must speak of this one before long, I was not at all
anxious to do so; and I think I have read that this is a common case.

So all I said was: "Did you see the old man you meant to?"

"Old Mitchell? Yes, I did; and got something of a story out of him.
I'll keep it till after dinner. It really is rather odd."

So when we were settled after dinner he began to report, faithfully,
as he said, the dialogue that had taken place. Mitchell, not far off
eighty years old, was in his elbow-chair. The married daughter with
whom he lived was in and out preparing for tea.

After the usual salutations: "Mitchell, I want you to tell me
something about the Wood."

"What Wood's that, Master Reginald?"

"Betton Wood. Do you remember it?"

Mitchell slowly raised his hand and pointed an accusing forefinger.
"It were your father done away with Betton Wood, Master Reginald, I
can tell you that much."

"Well, I know it was, Mitchell. You needn't look at me as if it were
my fault."

"Your fault? No, I says it were your father done it, before your
time."

"Yes, and I dare say if the truth was known, it was your father that
advised him to do it, and I want to know why."

Mitchell seemed a little amused. "Well," he said, "my father were
woodman to your father and your grandfather before him, and if he
didn't know what belonged to his business, he'd oughter done. And if
he did give advice that way, I suppose he might have had his reasons,
mightn't he now?"

"Of course he might, and I want you to tell me what they were."

"Well now, Master Reginald, whatever makes you think as I know what
his reasons might 'a been I don't know how many year ago?"

"Well, to be sure, it is a long time, and you might easily have
forgotten, if ever you knew. I suppose the only thing is for me to go
and ask old Ellis what he can recollect about it."

That had the effect I hoped for.

"Old Ellis!" he growled. "First time ever I hear anyone say old Ellis
were any use for any purpose. I should 'a thought you know'd better
than that yourself, Master Reginald. What do you suppose old Ellis can
tell you better'n what I can about Betton Wood, and what call have he
got to be put afore me, I should like to know. His father warn't
woodman on the place: he were ploughman--that's what he was, and so
anyone could tell you what knows; anyone could tell you that, I says."

"Just so, Mitchell, but if you know all about Betton Wood and won't
tell me, why, I must do the next best I can, and try and get it out
of somebody else; and old Ellis has been on the place very nearly as
long as you have."

"That he ain't, not by eighteen months! Who says I wouldn't tell you
nothing about the Wood? I ain't no objection; only it's a funny kind
of a tale, and 'taint right to my thinkin' it should be all about the
parish. You, Lizzie, do you keep in your kitchen a bit. Me and Master
Reginald wants to have a word or two private. But one thing I'd like
to know, Master Reginald, what come to put you upon asking about it
to-day?"

"Oh! well, I happened to hear of an old saying about something that
walks in Betton Wood. And I wondered if that had anything to do with
its being cleared away: that's all."

"Well, you was in the right, Master Reginald, however you come to hear
of it, and I believe I can tell you the rights of it better than
anyone in this parish, let alone old Ellis. You see it came about this
way: that the shortest road to Allen's Farm laid through the Wood, and
when we was little my poor mother she used to go so many times in the
week to the farm to fetch a quart of milk, because Mr. Allen what had
the farm then under your father, he was a good man, and anyone that
had a young family to bring up, he was willing to allow 'em so much in
the week. But never you mind about that now. And my poor mother she
never liked to go through the Wood, because there was a lot of talk
in the place, and sayings like what you spoke about just now. But
every now and again, when she happened to be late with her work, she'd
have to take the short road through the Wood, and as sure as ever she
did, she'd come home in a rare state. I remember her and my father
talking about it, and he'd say, 'Well, but it can't do you no harm,
Emma,' and she'd say, 'Oh! but you haven't an idear of it, George.
Why, it went right through my head,' she says, 'and I came over all
bewildered-like, and as if I didn't know where I was. You see,
George,' she says, 'it ain't as if you was about there in the dusk.
You always goes there in the daytime, now don't you?' and he says:
'Why, to be sure I do; do you take me for a fool?' And so they'd go
on. And time passed by, and I think it wore her out, because, you
understand, it warn't no use to go for the milk not till the
afternoon, and she wouldn't never send none of us children instead,
for fear we should get a fright. Nor she wouldn't tell us about it
herself. 'No,' she says, 'it's bad enough for me. I don't want no one
else to go through it, nor yet hear talk about it.' But one time I
recollect she says, 'Well, first it's a rustling-like all along in the
bushes, coming very quick, either towards me or after me according to
the time, and then there comes this scream as appears to pierce right
through from the one ear to the other, and the later I am coming
through, the more like I am to hear it twice over; but thanks be, I
never yet heard it the three times.' And then I asked her, and I
says: 'Why, that seems like someone walking to and fro all the time,
don't it?' and she says, 'Yes, it do, and whatever it is she wants, I
can't think': and I says, 'Is it a woman, mother?' and she says, 'Yes,
I've heard it is a woman.'

"Anyway, the end of it was my father he spoke to your father, and told
him the Wood was a bad wood. 'There's never a bit of game in it, and
there's never a bird's nest there,' he says, 'and it ain't no manner
of use to you.' And after a lot of talk, your father he come and see
my mother about it, and he see she warn't one of these silly women as
gets nervish about nothink at all, and he made up his mind there was
somethink in it, and after that he asked about in the neighbourhood,
and I believe he made out somethink, and wrote it down in a paper what
very like you've got up at the Court, Master Reginald. And then he
gave the order, and the Wood was stubbed up. They done all the work in
the daytime, I recollect, and was never there after three o'clock."

"Didn't they find anything to explain it, Mitchell? No bones or
anything of that kind?"

"Nothink at all, Master Reginald, only the mark of a hedge and ditch
along the middle, much about where the quickset hedge run now; and
with all the work they done, if there had been anyone put away there,
they was bound to find 'em. But I don't know whether it done much
good, after all. People here don't seem to like the place no better
than they did afore."

"That's about what I got out of Mitchell," said Philipson, "and as far
as any explanation goes, it leaves us very much where we were. I must
see if I can't find that paper."

"Why didn't your father ever tell you about the business?" I said.

"He died before I went to school, you know, and I imagine he didn't
want to frighten us children by any such story. I can remember being
shaken and slapped by my nurse for running up that lane towards the
Wood when we were coming back rather late one winter afternoon: but in
the daytime no one interfered with our going into the Wood if we
wanted to--only we never did want."

"Hm!" I said, and then, "Do you think you'll be able to find that
paper that your father wrote?"

"Yes," he said, "I do. I expect it's no farther away than that
cupboard behind you. There's a bundle or two of things specially put
aside, most of which I've looked through at various times, and I know
there's one envelope labelled Betton Wood: but as there was no Betton
Wood any more, I never thought it would be worth while to open it, and
I never have. We'll do it now, though."

"Before you do," I said (I was still reluctant, but I thought this was
perhaps the moment for my disclosure), "I'd better tell you I think
Mitchell was right when he doubted if clearing away the Wood had put
things straight." And I gave the account you have heard already: I
need not say Philipson was interested. "Still there?" he said. "It's
amazing. Look here, will you come out there with me now, and see what
happens?"

"I will do no such thing," I said, "and if you knew the feeling, you'd
be glad to walk ten miles in the opposite direction. Don't talk of it.
Open your envelope, and let's hear what your father made out."

He did so, and read me the three or four pages of jottings which it
contained. At the top was written a motto from Scott's _Glenfinlas_,
which seemed to me well-chosen:


    "Where walks, they say, the shrieking ghost."


Then there were notes of his talk with Mitchell's mother, from which I
extract only this much. "I asked her if she never thought she saw
anything to account for the sounds she heard. She told me, no more
than once, on the darkest evening she ever came through the Wood; and
then she seemed forced to look behind her as the rustling came in the
bushes, and she thought she saw something all in tatters with the two
arms held out in front of it coming on very fast, and at that she ran
for the stile, and tore her gown all to flinders getting over it."

Then he had gone to two other people whom he found very shy of
talking. They seemed to think, among other things, that it reflected
discredit on the parish. However, one, Mrs. Emma Frost, was prevailed
upon to repeat what her mother had told her. "They say it was a lady
of title that married twice over, and her first husband went by the
name of Brown, or it might have been Bryan ("Yes, there were Bryans at
the Court before it came into our family," Philipson put in), and she
removed her neighbour's landmark: leastways she took in a fair piece
of the best pasture in Betton parish what belonged by rights to two
children as hadn't no one to speak for them, and they say years after
she went from bad to worse, and made out false papers to gain
thousands of pounds up in London, and at last they was proved in law
to be false, and she would have been tried and put to death very like,
only she escaped away for the time. But no one can't avoid the curse
that's laid on them that removes the landmark, and so we take it she
can't leave Betton before someone take and put it right again."

At the end of the paper there was a note to this effect. "I regret
that I cannot find any clue to previous owners of the fields adjoining
the Wood. I do not hesitate to say that if I could discover their
representatives, I should do my best to indemnify them for the wrong
done to them in years now long past: for it is undeniable that the
Wood is very curiously disturbed in the manner described by the people
of the place. In my present ignorance alike of the extent of the land
wrongly appropriated, and of the rightful owners, I am reduced to
keeping a separate note of the profits derived from this part of the
estate, and my custom has been to apply the sum that would represent
the annual yield of about five acres to the common benefit of the
parish and to charitable uses: and I hope that those who succeed me
may see fit to continue this practice."

So much for the elder Mr. Philipson's paper. To those who, like
myself, are readers of the State Trials it will have gone far to
illuminate the situation. They will remember how between the years
1678 and 1684 the Lady Ivy, formerly Theodosia Bryan, was alternately
Plaintiff and Defendant in a series of trials in which she was trying
to establish a claim against the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's for a
considerable and very valuable tract of land in Shadwell: how in the
last of those trials, presided over by L.C.J. Jeffreys, it was proved
up to the hilt that the deeds upon which she based her claim were
forgeries executed under her orders: and how, after an information for
perjury and forgery was issued against her, she disappeared
completely--so completely, indeed, that no expert has ever been able
to tell me what became of her.

Does not the story I have told suggest that she may still be heard of
on the scene of one of her earlier and more successful exploits?

    *    *    *    *    *

"That," said my friend, as he folded up his papers, "is a very
faithful record of my one extraordinary experience. And now----"

But I had so many questions to ask him, as for instance, whether his
friend had found the proper owner of the land, whether he had done
anything about the hedge, whether the sounds were ever heard now, what
was the exact title and date of his pamphlet, etc., etc., that
bed-time came and passed, without his having an opportunity to revert
to the Literary Supplement of _The Times_.

    *    *    *    *    *

[Thanks to the researches of Sir John Fox, in his book on _The Lady
Ivie's Trial_ (Oxford, 1929), we now know that my heroine died in her
bed in 1695, having--heaven knows how--been acquitted of the forgery,
for which she had undoubtedly been responsible.]




[End of _A Neighbour's Landmark_ by M. R. James]
