A SCHOOL STORY

A SCHOOL STORY

by M. R. James


Two men in a smoking-room were talking of their private-school days. "At our
school," said A., "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. The staircase was a stone one. I never heard any story about
the thing. That seems odd, when you come to think of it. Why didn't somebody
invent one, I wonder?"

"You never can tell with little boys. They have a mythology of their own.
There's a subject for you, by the way - "The Folklore of Private Schools."

"Yes; the crop is rather scanty, though. I imagine, if you were to
investigate the cycle of ghost stories, for instance, which the boys at
private schools tell each other, they would all turn out to be
highly-compressed versions of stories out of books."

"Nowadays the Strand and Pearson's, and so on, would be extensively drawn
upon."

"No doubt: they weren't born or thought of in my time. Let's see. I
wonder if I can remember the staple ones that I was told. First, there was
the house with a room in which a series of people insisted on passing a
night; and each of them in the morning was found kneeling in a corner, and
had just time to say, 'I've seen it,' and died."

"Wasn't that the house in Berkeley Square?"

"I dare say it was. Then there was the man who heard a noise in the
passage at night, opened his door, and saw someone crawling towards him on
all fours with his eye hanging out on his cheek. There was besides, let me
think - Yes! the room where a man was found dead in bed with a horseshoe
mark on his forehead, and the floor under the bed was covered with marks of
horseshoes also; I don't know why. Also there was the lady who, on locking
her bedroom door in a strange house, heard a thin voice among the
bed-curtains say, 'Now we're shut in for the night.' None of those had any
explanation or sequel. I wonder if they go on still, those stories."

"Oh, likely enough - with additions from the magazines, as I said. You
never heard, did you, of a real ghost at a private school? I thought not,
nobody has that ever I came across."

"From the way in which you said that, I gather 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, and I haven't any explanation of it.

"The school I mean 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, as there are in so many of the older
gardens in the Thames valley, and ancient elms in the three or four fields