Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  William was enjoying himself. He walked with a swagger. He almost believed what he said. She gasped.

  “Oh, go on!” she said. “Tell me all.”

  He went on. He soared aloft on the wings of imagination, his hands in his pockets, his freckled face puckered up in frowning mental effort. He certainly enjoyed himself.

  “If only some of it could happen to me,” breathed his confidante. “Does it come to you at nights, William?”

  “Yes,” nodded William. “Nights mostly.”

  “I shall – watch tonight,” said Cousin Mildred. “And you say the house is old?”

  “Awful old,” said William, reassuringly.

  Her attitude to William was a relief to the rest of the family. Visitors sometimes objected to William.

  “She seems to have almost taken to William,” said his mother, with a note of unflattering incredulity in her voice.

  William was pleased yet embarrassed by her attentions. It was a strange experience to him to be accepted by a grownup as a fellow-being. She talked to him with interest and a certain humility, she bought him sweets and seemed pleased that he accepted them, she went for walks with him, and evidently took his constrained silence for the silence of depth and wisdom.

  Beneath his embarrassment he was certainly pleased and flattered. She seemed to prefer his company to that of Ethel. That was one in the eye for Ethel. But he felt that something was expected from him in return for all this kindness and attention. William was a sportsman. He decided to supply it. He took a book of ghost stories from the juvenile library at school, and read them in the privacy of his room at night. Many were the thrilling adventures which he had to tell to Cousin Mildred in the morning. Cousin Mildred’s bump of credulity was a large one. She supplied him with sweets on a generous scale. She listened to him with awe and wonder.

  “William… you are one of the elect, the chosen,” she said, “one of those whose spirits can break down the barrier between the unseen world and ours with ease.” And always she sighed and stroked back her thin locks, sadly. “Oh, how I wish that some experience would happen to me!”

  One morning, after the gift of an exceptionally large tin of toffee, William’s noblest feelings were aroused. Manfully he decided that something should happen to her.

  Cousin Mildred slept in the bedroom above William’s. Descent from one window to the other was easy, but ascent was difficult. That night Cousin Mildred awoke suddenly as the clock struck twelve. There was no moon, and only dimly did she discern the white figure that stood in the light of the window. She sat up, quivering with eagerness. Her short, thin little pigtail, stuck out horizontally from her head. Her mouth was wide open.

  “Oh!” she gasped.

  The white figure moved a step forward and coughed nervously.

  Cousin Mildred clasped her hands.

  “Speak!” she said, in a tense whisper. “Oh, speak! Some message! Some revelation.”

  William was nonplussed. None of the ghosts he had read of had spoken. They had rattled and groaned and beckoned, but they had not spoken. He tried groaning and emitted a sound faintly reminiscent of a sea-sick voyager.

  “Oh, speak!” pleaded Cousin Mildred.

  Evidently speech was a necessary part of this performance. William wondered whether ghosts spoke English or a language of their own. He inclined to the latter view and nobly took the plunge.

  “Honk. Yonk. Ponk,” he said, firmly.

  Cousin Mildred gasped in wonder.

  “Oh, explain,” she pleaded, ardently. “Explain in our poor human speech. Some message –…”

  William took fright. It was all turning out to be much more complicated than he had expected. He hastily passed through the room and out of the door, closing it noisily behind him. As he ran along the passage came a sound like a crash of thunder. Outside in the passage were Cousin Mildred’s boots, William’s father’s boots, and William’s brother’s boots, and into these charged William in his headlong retreat. They slid noisily along the polished wooden surface of the floor, ricochetting into each other as they went. Doors opened suddenly and William’s father collided with William’s brother in the dark passage, where they wrestled fiercely before they discovered each other’s identity.

  “I heard that confounded noise and I came out –…”

  “So did I.”

  “Well, then, who made it?”

  “Who did?”

  “If it’s that wretched boy up to any tricks again –…”

  William’s father left the sentence unfinished, but went with determined tread towards his younger son’s room. William was discovered, carefully spreading a sheet over his bed and smoothing it down.

  Mr. Brown, roused from his placid slumbers, was a sight to make a brave man quail, but the glance that William turned upon him was guileless and sweet.

  “Did you make that confounded row kicking boots about the passage?” spluttered the man of wrath.

  “No, Father,” said William, gently. “I’ve not bin kickin’ no boots about.”

  “Were you down on the lower landing just now?” said Mr. Brown, with compressed fury.

  William considered this question silently for a few seconds, then spoke up brightly and innocently.

  “I dunno, Father. You see, some folks walk in their sleep and when they wake up they dunno where they’ve bin. Why, I’ve heard of a man walkin’ down a fire escape in his sleep, and then he woke up and couldn’t think how he’d got to be there where he was. You see, he didn’t know he’d walked down all them steps sound asleep, and –…”

  “Be quiet,” thundered his father. “What in the name of – what on earth are you doing making your bed in the middle of the night? Are you insane?”

  William, perfectly composed, tucked in one end of his sheet.

  “No Father, I’m not insane. My sheet just fell off me in the night and I got out to pick it up. I must of bin a bit restless, I suppose. Sheets come off easy when folks is restless in bed, and they don’t know anythin’ about it till they wake up jus’ same as sleep walkin’. Why, I’ve heard of folks –…”

  “Be quiet – !”

  At that moment William’s mother arrived, placid as ever, in her dressing gown, carrying a candle.

  “Look at him,” said Mr. Brown, pointing at the meek-looking William.

  “He plays Rugger up and down the passage with the boots all night and then he begins to make his bed. He’s mad. He’s –…”

  William turned his calm gaze upon him.

  “I wasn’t playin’ Rugger with the boots, Father,” he said, patiently.

  Mrs. Brown laid her hand soothingly upon her husband’s arm.

  “You know, dear,” she said, gently, “a house is always full of noises at night. Basket chairs creaking –…”

  Mr. Brown’s face grew purple.

  “Basket chairs – !” he exploded, violently, but allowed himself to be led unresisting from the room.

  William finished his bed-making with his usual frown of concentration, then, lying down, fell at once into the deep sleep of childish innocence.

  But Cousin Mildred was lying awake, a blissful smile upon her lips. She, too, was now one of the elect, the chosen. Her rather deaf ears had caught the sound of supernatural thunder as her ghostly visitant departed, and she had beamed with ecstatic joy.

  “Honk,” she murmured, dreamily. “Honk, Yonk, Ponk.”

  *

  William felt rather tired the next evening. Cousin Mildred had departed leaving him a handsome present of a large box of chocolates. William had consumed these with undue haste in view of possible maternal interference. His broken night was telling upon his spirits. He felt distinctly depressed and saw the world through jaundiced eyes. He sat in the shrubbery, his chin in his hand, staring moodily at the adoring mongrel, Jumble.

  “It’s a rotten world,” he said, gloomily. “I’ve took a lot of trouble over her and she goes and makes me feel sick with chocolates.”

  Jumb
le wagged his tail, sympathetically.

  THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE

  May Sinclair

  Mary Amelia St Clair (1863–1946) was born in Rock Ferry, Cheshire. Her father, a wealthy Liverpool ship owner, went bankrupt, sank into alcoholism and died when Sinclair was still young. Her education was cut short when she was called home from her first year at Cheltenham Ladies College to help nurse her five brothers, four of whom died of congenital heart disease. Sinclair was active in the women’s suffrage movement. Her interest in psychoanalysis and spiritualism were an influence on her fiction.

  This is the story Marston told me. He didn’t want to tell it. I had to tear it from him bit by bit. I’ve pieced the bits together in their time order, and explained things here and there, but the facts are the facts he gave me. There’s nothing that I didn’t get out of him somehow.

  Out of him – you’ll admit my source is unimpeachable. Edward Marston, the great K.C., and the author of an admirable work on “The Logic of Evidence”. You should have read the chapters on “What Evidence Is and What It Is Not”. You may say he lied; but if you knew Marston you’d know he wouldn’t lie, for the simple reason that he’s incapable of inventing anything. So that, if you ask me whether I believe this tale, all I can say is, I believe the things happened, because he said they happened and because they happened to him. As for what they were – well, I don’t pretend to explain it, neither would he.

  You know he was married twice. He adored his first wife, Rosamund, and Rosamund adored him. I suppose they were completely happy. She was fifteen years younger than he, and beautiful. I wish I could make you see how beautiful. Her eyes and mouth had the same sort of bow, full and wide-sweeping, and they stared out of her face with the same grave, contemplative innocence. Her mouth was finished off at each corner with the loveliest little moulding, rounded like the pistil of a flower. She wore her hair in a solid gold fringe over her forehead, like a child’s, and a big coil at the back. When it was let down it hung in a heavy cable to her waist. Marston used to tease her about it. She had a trick of tossing back the rope in the night when it was hot under her, and it would fall smack across his face and hurt him.

  There was a pathos about her that I can’t describe – a curious, pure, sweet beauty, like a child’s; perfect, and perfectly immature; so immature that you couldn’t conceive its lasting – like that – any more than childhood lasts. Marston used to say it made him nervous. He was afraid of waking up in the morning and finding that it had changed in the night. And her beauty was so much a part of herself that you couldn’t think of her without it. Somehow you felt that if it went she must go too.

  Well, she went first.

  For a year afterwards Marston existed dangerously, always on the edge of a breakdown. If he didn’t go over altogether it was because his work saved him. He had no consoling theories. He was one of those bigoted materialists of the nineteenth-century type who believe that consciousness is a purely physiological function, and that when your body’s dead, you’re dead. He saw no reason to suppose the contrary. “When you consider,” he used to say, “the nature of the evidence!”

  It’s as well to bear this in mind, so as to realise that he hadn’t any bias or anticipation. Rosamund survived for him only in his memory. And in his memory he was still in love with her. At the same time he used to discuss quite cynically the chances of his marrying again.

  It seems that in their honeymoon they had gone into that. Rosamund said she hated to think of his being lonely and miserable, supposing she died before he did. She would like him to marry again. If, she stipulated, he married the right woman.

  He had put it to her: “And if I marry the wrong one?”

  And she had said, That would be different. She couldn’t bear that.

  He remembered all this afterwards; but there was nothing in it to make him suppose, at the time, that she would take action.

  We talked it over, he and I, one night.

  “I suppose,” he said, “I shall have to marry again. It’s a physical necessity. But it won’t be anything more. I shan’t marry the sort of woman who’ll expect anything more. I won’t put another woman in Rosamund’s place. There’ll be no unfaithfulness about it.”

  And there wasn’t. Soon after that first year he married Pauline Silver.

  She was a daughter of old Justice Parker, who was a friend of Marston’s people. He hadn’t seen the girl till she came home from India after her divorce.

  Yes, there’d been a divorce. Silver had behaved very decently. He’d let her bring it against him, to save her. But there were some queer stories going about. They didn’t get round to Marston, because he was so mixed up with her people; and if they had he wouldn’t have believed them. He’d made up his mind he’d marry Pauline the first minute he’d seen her. She was handsome; the hard, black, white and vermilion kind, with a little aristocratic nose and a lascivious mouth.

  It was, as he had meant it to be, nothing but physical infatuation on both sides. No question of Pauline’s taking Rosamund’s place.

  Marston had a big case on at the time.

  They were in such a hurry that they couldn’t wait till it was over; and as it kept him in London they agreed to put off their honeymoon till the autumn, and he took her straight to his own house in Curzon Street.

  This, he admitted afterwards, was the part he hated. The Curzon Street house was associated with Rosamund; especially their bedroom – Rosamund’s bedroom – and his library. The library was the room Rosamund liked best, because it was his room. She had her place in the corner by the hearth, and they were always alone there together in the evenings when his work was done; and when it wasn’t done she would still sit with him, keeping quiet in her corner with a book.

  Luckily for Marston, at the first sight of the library Pauline took a dislike to it.

  I can hear her. “Br-rr-rh! There’s something beastly about this room, Edward. I can’t think how you can sit in it.”

  And Edward, a little caustic: “You needn’t, if you don’t like it.”

  “I certainly shan’t.”

  She stood there – I can see her – on the hearthrug by Rosamund’s chair, looking uncommonly handsome and lascivious. He was going to take her in his arms and kiss her vermilion mouth, when, he said, something stopped him. Stopped him clean, as if it had risen up and stopped between them. He supposed it was the memory of Rosamund, vivid in the place that had been hers.

  You see it was just that place, of silent, intimate communion, that Pauline would never take. And the rich, coarse, contented creature didn’t even want to take it. He saw that he would be left alone there, all right, with his memory.

  But the bedroom was another matter. That, Pauline had made it understood from the beginning, she would have to have. Indeed, there was no other he could well have offered her. The drawing-room covered the whole of the first floor. The bedrooms above were cramped, and this one had been formed by throwing the two front rooms into one. It looked south, and the bathroom opened out of it at the back. Marston’s small northern room had a door on the narrow landing at right angles to his wife’s door. He could hardly expect her to sleep there, still less in any of the tight boxes on the top floor. He said he wished he had sold the Curzon Street house.

  But Pauline was enchanted with the wide, three-windowed piece that was to be hers. It had been exquisitely furnished for poor little Rosamund: all seventeenth-century walnut wood, Bokhara rugs, thick silk curtains, deep blue with purple linings, and a big, rich bed covered with a purple counterpane embroidered in blue.

  One thing Marston insisted on: that he should sleep on Rosamund’s side of the bed, and Pauline in his own old place. He didn’t want to see Pauline’s body where Rosamund’s had been. Of course he had to lie about it and pretend he had always slept on the side next the window.

  I can see Pauline going about in that room, looking at everything; looking at herself, her black, white and vermilion, in the glass that had held Rosamund�
�s pure rose and gold; opening the wardrobe where Rosamund’s dresses used to hang, sniffing up the delicate, flower scent of Rosamund, not caring, covering it with her own thick trail.

  And Marston (who cared abominably) – I can see him getting more miserable and at the same time more excited as the wedding evening went on. He took her to the play to fill up the time, or perhaps to get her out of Rosamund’s rooms; God knows. I can see them sitting in the stalls, bored and restless, starting up and going out before the thing was half over, and coming back to that house in Curzon Street before eleven o’clock.

  It wasn’t much past eleven when he went to her room.

  I told you her door was at right angles to his, and the landing was narrow, so that anybody standing by Pauline’s door must have been seen the minute he opened his. He hadn’t even to cross the landing to get to her.

  Well, Marston swears that there was nothing there when he opened his own door; but when he came to Pauline’s he saw Rosamund standing up before it; and, he said, “She wouldn’t let me in.”

  Her arms were stretched out, barring the passage. Oh yes, he saw her face, Rosamund’s face; I gathered that it was utterly sweet, and utterly inexorable. He couldn’t pass her.

  So he turned into his own room, backing, he says, so that he could keep looking at her. And when he stood on the threshold of his own door she wasn’t there.

  No, he wasn’t frightened. He couldn’t tell me what he felt; but he left his door open all night because he couldn’t bear to shut it on her. And he made no other attempt to go in to Pauline; he was so convinced that the phantasm of Rosamund would come again and stop him.

  I don’t know what sort of excuse he made to Pauline the next morning. He said she was very stiff and sulky all day; and no wonder. He was still infatuated with her, and I don’t think that the phantasm of Rosamund had put him off Pauline in the least. In fact, he persuaded himself that the thing was nothing but a hallucination, due, no doubt, to his excitement.

  Anyhow, he didn’t expect to see it at the door again the next night.