A Vignette
[1][2] It is an unusually autobiographical story that seems to be based on an incident in James’s early life in Great Livermere[3] when, it is said, he had an experience in a haunted Plantation.
Soon after the narrator starts to have a recurring nightmare which always begins with himself looking out of his bedroom window and seeing the gardener and his assistants working.
In a panic he runs back into his bedroom where, once safely inside, he again looks out of the window - but he can see no sign of the figure in white at the wooden gate.
On their return the narrator's parents notice that their young son is upset over something but he manages to avoid telling them about the white figure outside the wooden gate.
The story concludes with the narrator considering if such creatures like the one he saw at the gate as a young boy were once a regular sight but are now only seen occasionally at specific locations.
Mr. Owen Hugh Smith was good enough to ask Dr. James to try to recapture the mood in which he wrote Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, and to let me have something in similar rein for the Christmas number of The London Mercury (1935).
On December 12th of that jear he sent of to me the MS., written in pencil, from The Lodge, Eton College, with the following letter: 'I am ill satisfied with what I enclose.
At the moment of going to press, I see it announced that the original manuscripts of his Ghost Stories are to appear at Sotheby's sale on November 9th (written on foolscap paper).
As a young boy, the narrator was afraid of some parts of the park, was deeply affected by nightmares and saw a strange apparition with his own eyes.
James claimed that as a boy he suffered repeated nightmares in which he dreamt that on looking out of his bedroom window in the Rectory he would see strange movements in the garden as some unseen thing moved towards the house.
As the sound of footsteps were heard coming up the stairs and an unseen hand reached for his bedroom door the young James would wake up.
He begins to wonder if the house is haunted, and when he went into the garden to investigate further he saw a horrific pink, malevolent face with large staring eyes peering back at him through a hole in the gate.
