Identify this short (ghost) story!

Cafe Society
1

Okay, I read this many years ago, probably in an anthology I checked out of the library.

It’s an English “club story”…or based on such. Men are telling tales together.

A “little man” tells a story about how he had been caught on a precarious edge, in Africa or someplace, along with another fellow. One way or another, both were caught in a deadly situation.

One of the listeners says that, if he was telling the truth, he would not have escaped. “Quite,” the little man says. And the other man would not have escaped. “Quite,” the little man says. And so no one is left as a witness.

“So,” the listener says, “if you are telling the truth, you must be a ghost.”

“Quite,” said the little man, and vanished."
Ho-kay. I know Lord Dunsany probably did it first, and definitely did it better, with “In a Dim Room,” back in the 1940s in the Fourth Book of Jorkens. But the purity and spookiness of this version is what makes it for me.

I’m looking for bedtime stories to give my kids nightmares. Please help me find this tale.

2

hey, Ike –

this is doing a niggling little itch at the back of my brain. it sounds soooooo familiar, but i can’t quite place it.

it feels like it was part of a collected set of short stories i read many, many moons ago. i’m thinking something like Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales of the White Hart. (i’m pretty sure it’s not Asimov’s The Black Widowers stories, since they mostly deal in solving mysteries.) but IIRC, the White Hart tales usually contained a “twist” at the end, so your story seems like a good candidate.

and give my love to Ermintrude, if you go there.

3

Sterling E. Lanier published a series that honored/ripped-off Jorkins.

You might look into that angle.