The Return

CAN you all hear me? I am speaking on the wireless. And I believe that I am in touch with you.

I thought that perhaps you might care to hear a ghost story. An actual personal experience, with nothing secondhand about it. A thing that occurred actually to myself, perhaps the most personal ghost story that any of you may have heard.

Well, to begin with, I was a long way away, when there came over me very suddenly an irresistible feeling to return to the old haunts that I had known a long while ago. I say ‘to begin with,’ for one must begin somewhere; and my long wanderings, and the remote parts to which I had come, are not much concerned with this tale. Sufficient that I turned at once for home, borne by a longing so strong that it seemed to leave me no choice, and I came in the course of time to that very village whose every chimney I knew. Every path I knew there too, and every little track running off from the paths the width of a single footstep, by which children ran to gardens of their own that they had found or made among weeds; but some of these paths had altered in the long time since I was there. It was a long, long time. The old public house was the same, the Green Man at the corner. And there I drifted, almost aimlessly, and yet with a feeling that there as much as anywhere I might find the life of the old village throbbing away. It was as I passed over the fields on the way to the Green Man that I first heard people talking about a ghost. I was passing a wheat field, over the stubble, brushing by a line of sheaves, when two men at work there, taking the sheaves away, began to talk of the ghost all of a sudden. ‘They say it comes every hundred years,’ said one. I knew at once they were speaking about a ghost.

‘Yes,’ said the other, looking up at the leaves turning with the earliest touch of autumn, ‘and it should be about the very day.’

‘It is,’ said the first; and I heard them say no more, and passed on feeling sure I should hear more at the inn. At the inn I knew none of them, not one; and, where once I thought I did, it was only some old family likeness. So I sat all by myself in a corner beside a curtain and listened to what they said. And, just as I came in, their talk took the same turn as what I had heard in the cornfield. There was a ghost, it seemed, that came to that village once in a hundred years, and the hundred years were up. ‘Might be coming soon,’ said one, who looked like a gamekeeper.

‘Aye, if there’s any truth in it,’ said a farmer.

‘True enough, by all accounts,’ said some.

‘And there’s been a look about the shadows lately,’ the keeper said, ‘like what my grandmother told me of.’ ‘Your grandmother?’ one of them asked.

‘Yes, she saw it,’ he said.

‘Must have been an old woman,’ said a man, looking round from the bar, on which he was leaning.

‘Saw it as a child,’ said the keeper.

‘I would n’t walk near the stream to-night,’ said another, ‘not if any mist was rising. You’d meet it, all damp in the mist.’

I sat there quietly in the shade of the curtain listening to all they said.

‘Wonder where it comes from,’ said the farmer.

‘Ah,’ they all said, and shook their heads, and no one even ventured to guess about that.

‘Drifts over the fields where it used to walk, I expect, and up to the old house,’ said the bartender. ‘But as to where it comes from — ah.’

And then their talk died away, as though it were somehow chilled by a draft blowing out of eternity. And when I saw I should get no more of this story from them I slipped quietly out of the room.

Two women were talking on a doorstep as I passed the next house; they seemed to be talking about the price of tea. And suddenly I heard one say: ‘It will be about the hundred years.’

‘Aye,’ said the other one, ‘I should n’t wonder.’ And one of them went inside the house at that, and the other hurried away along the street, and I was all alone once more.

I passed a group of children in the road; and saw from a certain hush that came over their playing, and from the way that a few of them put their heads together and glanced up towards the old house, that they too were talking of the ghost. It left no doubt that that house was the seat of the mystery, and that there these ends of tales one heard in the village would be all gathered together. But when would it be? Was it the hundred years? It hardly seemed to me that it could be yet. The air seemed somehow not quite sufficiently haunted, though it hardly seems worth telling you so airy a fancy. Partly to see the old village again, and partly to get more facts, if I could, about this tale of the ghost, I hung about the village. I went to the village green. It delighted me to see the calm old space again — altered, but not out of knowledge; and there were geese on it, just as of old. And then a young man and a girl came by, going along a path that slanted across the green, the same path that there had been in my time. And by some strange chance they too, as soon as they came within hearing, began to speak of the end of the hundred years, and that visitor that all of them were expecting. Half believing and half wondering, they passed away out of hearing.

One is moved by impulses more than by reason when one comes to old haunts that one knew. Had reason moved me alone, I should have gone at once to the old house on the hill beyond the village, and satisfied my curiosity there. But stronger than curiosity, stronger than any other emotion within me, I found the lure of the great willows, standing in their strange attitudes by the long-remembered stream. To them I went as evening began to draw in. A white mist rose as I came, and began to creep slowly through fields that sloped to the stream. I went with it, glad of its company, and loitered about those fields whose every boundary was unchanged by even a yard since the days when I knew them. And there the old haystacks stood, dark in the same corners, as though they had never been used since last I saw them; and the mist came up and touched them, and flowed about them, till they stood amongst it like islands. I seemed to know every one of them, not only by their positions, but by the size of them. You see, nothing could ever have happened in the years since I was there to make each field give more hay, or any less, or to find a better place for the haystack to stand in each field. It was this that made me see, what I already profoundly felt, that I still had my share in this village. Much had changed, but the fundamental things were there as ever. Indeed it could not have been otherwise. And it made me feel more friendly with the mist, with which I was sauntering amongst these remembered nooks, to reflect that it was another of those things that would be in that valley always. Or if it wandered away in the warm weather, carried off by some stray wind, it would return like myself.

Couples walking late, or men traveling lonely, turned now away from the mist, as though they found something ominous in its waving and wandering whiteness; they turned suddenly for the uplands, and we were left quite alone. And I knew they were right to avoid the stream at this hour, for there was a most haunted feeling about it, and that feeling slowly increased as the evening grew stiller and later. Rooks passed, and all the singing birds were asleep. A few wild ducks came over, and circled once, and dropped past me down to their home in a patch of irises; they alone seeming unperturbed by whatever was making the mist so unmistakably eerie. And then a silence fell that nothing disturbed at all, and all the while the eeriness was increasing. It was like that till the moon rose. But when the moon came huge and yellow and magical and very nearly full, almost with a leap over a ridge of the downland that showed just clear of the osiers, I suddenly knew that the hundred years were up, and that whatever haunted the old house over the meadows, on the opposite side from the moon, would be now on its way if ever. So I left the stream at once and turned for the hill, to see what was to be seen.

I went, all the way, over fields every one of which I had carried so long in my memory that I knew my way unmistakably. Sometimes they differed from the picture of them that I had treasured so long, but only by being a little duller, by shining a little less vividly, as must be the way with heavy solid earth when compared with an old memory. Voices were rising now in the village behind me, as though the large moon coming over the ridges, or the end of the hundred years, had awoken all of a sudden uneasy apprehensions; and not only human voices rose in a hum, but there came sharply through them the outcry of dogs, which clearly shared the vague fear that seemed haunting their masters. The sound of the voices grew low as I moved away from them, but never ceased to fill the night with fear. At what moment the hundred years would end I knew not, but it seemed to me that as the moon rose higher the very last hours of the century were falling away.

I crossed a road, and a couple walking down it paused suddenly and looked up to the old house on the hill. I saw the shape of it, dark, with no windows lit, though now and then the moon flashed curiously upon panes. And this bulk in the night, with flashes upon the windows, I knew for the end of my journey. In this house my life had begun, and to it I returned. It was this house that had called me, through all the length of my wanderings, and that I felt drawing me now, as the Pole draws the needles of magnets. I paid no heed any more to that uneasy hum that came quavering up from voices astir in the village, but left them to whatever troubled them in the mist, and made straight for that house. Far down below me now were the mist and its fears, and the slope of the hill steepened. I swept up it; and just as I came to the edge of the lawns I knew, as I know no other lawns, I found a high wall before me. They had built it since the days when I knew those lawns. There seemed something about the moon and about the hour that told me not to loiter before this wall, and I pressed on to the house.

The lawns were the same as ever, and all the dew was glittering under the moon, and a hush was heavy upon them, and the house was deep in sleep. Not a sound came from the black bulk of the house, not a movement of door or window, though I had returned to my home from so far and after so long. It stood there black and silent, but the chill and the hush and the darkness of the house were to stop me no more than the wall. I had come from so far to see those lawns again, and the old house standing amongst them. I went round to the door, and the glass which there was in its panels stared blankly at me, with shutters behind them; and all the bolts were locked. There a dog saw me. It had been lying down in a barrel, guarding the door, when it suddenly saw me and howled. But still no sound or movement came from the house.

I knew I was very near to the end of my long journey now, the old wainscot of oak on an upper landing, carved with the curious heads of ancient kings, dark with the years and darkening all the corridor, that ran to the door of a room that was once my nursery. I knew now that this carved oak was the end of my journey. I entered the house, and the dog howled once more. Before me, all in the dark, were the stairs I knew. I needed no light. I knew every turn of those stairs, and every step of them, and the very flight of the echoes that used to rise from the creak of each different board. I sped up them, and the dog was howling now with one long quivering howl. I came to the landing, and there was the old dark corridor, and there were the ancient heads with their curious faces that seemed to look at me with the first welcome I had had since my long journey began. The howling of the dog, which was louder now, seemed at last to disturb the house, for far away I heard the thudding of footsteps. And the steps were coming towards me.

Can you hear me? I feel that you can. I believe I am near you. A door opened some way off. The steps were nearer. A woman came along the corridor, holding a candle, walking slowly, and looking about her anxiously as she came. And just then clearly out of the tower of the old church of the village the notes of midnight floated over the mist; and it felt to me at that moment that the hundred years were over. And all of a sudden the woman holding the candle saw me. She seemed to see me more clearly than any had done in the village: I noticed that in her eyes as her mouth opened slowly. And then she screamed.

This is a personal experience. Nothing secondhand, as so often there is in such stories. I turned from the woman’s white face to the dark of the old carved wainscot, whose every panel and every figure I knew; and, sinking far into that venerable timber, sinking home to the deeps of the oak, I knew that I was the ghost.