The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories

by The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories- From Elizabeth Gaskell to Ambrose Bierce (retail) (epub)

  It seemed to me that it must be the middle of the night, as we all walked back. It was in reality very late. Dr Moncrieff put his arm into mine. He walked slowly, with an air of exhaustion. It was as if we were coming from a deathbed. Something hushed and solemnized the very air. There was that sense of relief in it which there always is at the end of a death-struggle. And nature, persistent, never daunted, came back in all of us, as we returned into the ways of life. We said nothing to each other, indeed, for a time; but when we got clear of the trees and reached the opening near the house, where we could see the sky, Dr Moncrieff himself was the first to speak. ‘I must be going,’ he said; ‘it’s very late, I’m afraid. I will go down the glen, as I came.’

  ‘But not alone. I am going with you, Doctor.’

  ‘Well, I will not oppose it. I am an old man, and agitation wearies more than work. Yes; I’ll be thankful of your arm. To-night, Colonel, you’ve done me more good turns than one.’

  I pressed his hand on my arm, not feeling able to speak. But Simson, who turned with us, and who had gone along all this time with his taper flaring, in entire unconsciousness, came to himself, apparently at the sound of our voices, and put out that wild little torch with a quick movement, as if of shame. ‘Let me carry your lantern,’ he said; ‘it is heavy.’ He recovered with a spring, and in a moment, from the awe-stricken spectator he had been, became himself, sceptical and cynical. ‘I should like to ask you a question,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in Purgatory, Doctor? It’s not in the tenets of the Church, so far as I know.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Dr Moncrieff, ‘an old man like me is sometimes not very sure what he believes. There is just one thing I am certain of – and that is the loving-kindness of God.’

  ‘But I thought that was in this life. I am no theologian – ’

  ‘Sir,’ said the old man again, with a tremor in him which I could feel going over all his frame, ‘if I saw a friend of mine within the gates of hell, I would not despair but his Father would take him by the hand still – if he cried like yon.’

  ‘I allow it is very strange – very strange. I cannot see through it. That there must be human agency, I feel sure. Doctor, what made you decide upon the person and the name?’

  The minister put out his hand with the impatience which a man might show if he were asked how he recognized his brother. ‘Tuts!’ he said, in familiar speech – then more solemnly, ‘how should I not recognize a person that I know better – far better – than I know you?’

  ‘Then you saw the man?’

  Dr Moncrieff made no reply. He moved his hand again with a little impatient movement, and walked on, leaning heavily on my arm. And we went on for a long time without another word, threading the dark paths, which were steep and slippery with the damp of the winter. The air was very still – not more than enough to make a faint sighing in the branches, which mingled with the sound of the water to which we were descending. When we spoke again, it was about indifferent matters – about the height of the river, and the recent rains. We parted with the minister at his own door, where his old housekeeper appeared in great perturbation, waiting for him. ‘Eh me, minister! the young gentleman will be worse?’ she cried.

  ‘Far from that – better. God bless him!’ Dr Moncrieff said.

  I think if Simson had begun again to me with his questions, I should have pitched him over the rocks as we returned up the glen; but he was silent, by a good inspiration. And the sky was clearer than it had been for many nights, shining high over the trees, with here and there a star faintly gleaming through the wilderness of dark and bare branches. The air, as I have said, was very soft in them, with a subdued and peaceful cadence. It was real, like every natural sound, and came to us like a hush of peace and relief. I thought there was a sound in it as of the breath of a sleeper, and it seemed clear to me that Roland must be sleeping, satisfied and calm. We went up to his room when we went in. There we found the complete hush of rest. My wife looked up out of a doze, and gave me a smile; ‘I think he is a great deal better: but you are very late,’ she said in a whisper, shading the light with her hand that the doctor might see his patient. The boy had got back something like his own colour. He woke as we stood all round his bed. His eyes had the happy half-awakened look of childhood, glad to shut again, yet pleased with the interruption and glimmer of the light. I stooped over him and kissed his forehead, which was moist and cool. ‘All is well, Roland,’ I said. He looked up at me with a glance of pleasure, and took my hand and laid his cheek upon it, and so went to sleep.

  For some nights after, I watched among the ruins, spending all the dark hours up to midnight patrolling about the bit of wall which was associated with so many emotions; but I heard nothing, and saw nothing beyond the quiet course of nature: nor, so far as I am aware, has anything been heard again. Dr Moncrieff gave me the history of the youth, whom he never hesitated to name. I did not ask, as Simson did, how he recognized him. He had been a prodigal – weak, foolish, easily imposed upon, and ‘led away,’ as people say.18 All that we had heard had passed actually in life, the Doctor said. The young man had come home thus a day or two after his mother died – who was no more than the housekeeper in the old house – and distracted with the news, had thrown himself down at the door and called upon her to let him in. The old man could scarcely speak of it for tears. To me it seemed as if – heaven help us, how little do we know about anything! – a scene like that might impress itself somehow upon the hidden heart of nature. I do not pretend to know how, but the repetition had struck me at the time as, in its terrible strangeness and incomprehensibility, almost mechanical – as if the unseen actor could not exceed or vary, but was bound to re-enact the whole. One thing that struck me, however, greatly, was the likeness between the old minister and my boy in the manner of regarding these strange phenomena. Dr Moncrieff was not terrified, as I had been myself, and all the rest of us. It was no ‘ghost,’ as I fear we all vulgarly considered it, to him – but a poor creature whom he knew under these conditions, just as he had known him in the flesh, having no doubt of his identity. And to Roland it was the same. This spirit in pain – if it was a spirit – this voice out of the unseen – was a poor fellow-creature in misery, to be succoured and helped out of his trouble, to my boy. He spoke to me quite frankly about it when he got better. ‘I knew father would find out some way,’ he said. And this was when he was strong and well, and all idea that he would turn hysterical or become a seer of visions had happily passed away.

  I must add one curious fact which does not seem to me to have any relation to the above, but which Simson made great use of, as the human agency which he was determined to find somehow. We had examined the ruins very closely at the time of these occurrences; but afterwards, when all was over, as we went casually about them one Sunday afternoon in the idleness of that unemployed day, Simson with his stick penetrated an old window which had been entirely blocked up with fallen soil. He jumped down into it in great excitement, and called me to follow. There we found a little hole – for it was more a hole than a room – entirely hidden under the ivy and ruins, in which there was a quantity of straw laid in a corner, as if some one had made a bed there, and some remains of crusts about the floor. Some one had lodged there, and not very long before, he made out; and that this unknown being was the author of all the mysterious sounds we heard he is convinced. ‘I told you it was human agency,’ he said, triumphantly. He forgets, I suppose, how he and I stood with our lights seeing nothing, while the space between us was audibly traversed by something that could speak, and sob, and suffer. There is no argument with men of this kind. He is ready to get up a laugh against me on this slender ground. ‘I was puzzled myself – I could not make it out – but I always felt convinced human agency was at the bottom of it. And here it is – and a clever fellow he must have been,’ the Doctor says.

  Bagley left my service as soon as he got well. He assured me it was no want of respect; but he could not stand ‘them kind of things,’ and the man
was so shaken and ghastly that I was glad to give him a present and let him go. For my own part, I made a point of staying out the time, two years, for which I had taken Brentwood; but I did not renew my tenancy. By that time we had settled, and found for ourselves a pleasant home of our own.

  I must add that when the doctor defies me, I can always bring back gravity to his countenance, and a pause in his railing, when I remind him of the juniper-bush. To me that was a matter of little importance. I could believe I was mistaken. I did not care about it one way or other; but on his mind the effect was different. The miserable voice, the spirit in pain, he could think of as the result of ventriloquism, or reverberation, or – anything you please: an elaborate prolonged hoax executed somehow by the tramp that had found a lodging in the old tower. But the juniper-bush staggered him. Things have effects so different on the minds of different men.

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  At the End of the Passage

  The sky is lead and our faces are red,

  And the gates of Hell are opened and riven,

  And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven,

  And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven,

  And the clouds come down in a fiery sheet,

  Heavy to raise and hard to be borne.

  And the soul of man is turned from his meat,

  Turned from the trifles for which he has striven

  Sick in his body, and heavy hearted,

  And his soul flies up like the dust in the sheet

  Breaks from his flesh and is gone and departed,

  As the blasts they blow on the cholera-horn.

  Himalayan1

  Four men, each entitled to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ sat at a table playing whist.2 The thermometer marked – for them – one hundred and one degrees of heat. The room was darkened till it was only just possible to distinguish the pips of the cards and the very white faces of the players. A tattered, rotten punkah of whitewashed calico was puddling the hot air and whining dolefully at each stroke.3 Outside lay gloom of a November day in London. There was neither sky, sun, nor horizon, – nothing but a brown purple haze of heat. It was as though the earth were dying of apoplexy.4

  From time to time clouds of tawny dust rose from the ground without wind or warning, flung themselves tablecloth-wise among the tops of the parched trees, and came down again. Then a whirling dust-devil would scutter across the plain for a couple of miles, break, and fall outward, though there was nothing to check its flight save a long low line of piled railway-sleepers white with the dust, a cluster of huts made of mud, condemned rails, and canvas, and the one squat four-roomed bungalow that belonged to the assistant engineer in charge of a section of the Gaudhari State line then under construction.5

  The four, stripped to the thinnest of sleeping-suits, played whist crossly, with wranglings as to leads and returns. It was not the best kind of whist, but they had taken some trouble to arrive at it. Mottram of the Indian Survey had ridden thirty and railed one hundred miles from his lonely post in the desert since the night before; Lowndes of the Civil Service, on special duty in the political department, had come as far to escape for an instant the miserable intrigues of an impoverished native State whose king alternately fawned and blustered for more money from the pitiful revenues contributed by hard-wrung peasants and despairing camel-breeders; Spurstow, the doctor of the line, had left a cholera-stricken camp of coolies to look after itself for forty-eight hours while he associated with white men once more.6 Hummil, the assistant engineer, was the host. He stood fast and received his friends thus every Sunday if they could come in. When one of them failed to appear, he would send a telegram to his last address, in order that he might know whether the defaulter were dead or alive. There are very many places in the East where it is not good or kind to let your acquaintances drop out of sight even for one short week.

  The players were not conscious of any special regard for each other. They squabbled whenever they met; but they ardently desired to meet, as men without water desire to drink. They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age, – which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

  ‘Pilsener?’ said Spurstow, after the second rubber, mopping his forehead.7

  ‘Beer’s out, I’m sorry to say, and there’s hardly enough soda-water for to-night,’ said Hummil.

  ‘What filthy bad management!’ Spurstow snarled.

  ‘Can’t help it. I’ve written and wired; but the trains don’t come through regularly yet. Last week the ice ran out, – as Lowndes knows.’

  ‘Glad I didn’t come. I could ha’ sent you some if I had known, though. Phew! it’s too hot to go on playing bumblepuppy.’8 This with a savage scowl at Lowndes, who only laughed. He was a hardened offender.

  Mottram rose from the table and looked out of a chink in the shutters.

  ‘What a sweet day!’ said he.

  The company yawned all together and betook themselves to an aimless investigation of all Hummil’s possessions, – guns, tattered novels, saddlery, spurs, and the like. They had fingered them a score of times before, but there was really nothing else to do.

  ‘Got anything fresh?’ said Lowndes.

  ‘Last week’s Gazette of India, and a cutting from a home paper.9 My father sent it out. It’s rather amusing.’

  ‘One of those vestrymen that call ’emselves MP’s again, is it?’ said Spurstow, who read his newspapers when he could get them.

  ‘Yes. Listen to this. It’s to your address, Lowndes. The man was making a speech to his constituents, and he piled it on. Here’s a sample, “And I assert unhesitatingly that the Civil Service in India is the preserve – the pet preserve – of the aristocracy of England. What does the democracy – what do the masses – get from that country, which we have step by step fraudulently annexed? I answer, nothing whatever. It is farmed with a single eye to their own interests by the scions of the aristocracy. They take good care to maintain their lavish scale of incomes, to avoid or stifle any inquiries into the nature and conduct of their administration, while they themselves force the unhappy peasant to pay with the sweat of his brow for all the luxuries in which they are lapped.” ’ Hummil waved the cutting above his head. ‘’Ear! ’ear!’ said his audience.

  Then Lowndes, meditatively, ‘I’d give – I’d give three months’ pay to have that gentleman spend one month with me and see how the free and independent native prince works things. Old Timbersides’ – this was his flippant title for an honoured and decorated feudatory prince – ‘has been wearing my life out this week past for money. By Jove, his latest performance was to send me one of his women as a bribe!’

  ‘Good for you! Did you accept it?’ said Mottram.

  ‘No. I rather wish I had, now. She was a pretty little person, and she yarned away to me about the horrible destitution among the king’s women-folk. The darlings haven’t had any new clothes for nearly a month, and the old man wants to buy a new drag from Calcutta, – solid silver railings and silver lamps, and trifles of that kind.10 I’ve tried to make him understand that he has played the deuce with the revenues for the last twenty years and must go slow. He can’t see it.’

  ‘But he has the ancestral treasure-vaults to draw on. There must be three millions at least in jewels and coin under his palace,’ said Hummil.

  ‘Catch a native king disturbing the family treasure! The priests forbid it except as the last resort. Old Timbersides has added something like a quarter of a million to the deposit in his reign.’

  ‘Where the mischief does it all come from?’ said Mottram.

  ‘The country. The state of the people is enough to make you sick. I’ve known the tax-men wait by a milch-camel till the foal was born and then hurry off the mother for arrears. And what can I do? I can’t get the court clerks to give me any accounts; I can’t raise anything more than a fat smile from the commander-in-chief when I find out the troops are three months in arre
ars; and old Timbersides begins to weep when I speak to him. He has taken to the King’s Peg heavily, – liqueur brandy for whisky, and Heidsieck for soda-water.’11

  ‘That’s what the Rao of Jubela took to.12 Even a native can’t last long at that,’ said Spurstow. ‘He’ll go out.’

  ‘And a good thing, too. Then I suppose we’ll have a council of regency, and a tutor for the young prince, and hand him back his kingdom with ten years’ accumulations.’

  ‘Whereupon that young prince, having been taught all the vices of the English, will play ducks and drakes with the money and undo ten years’ work in eighteen months. I’ve seen that business before,’ said Spurstow. ‘I should tackle the king with a light hand, if I were you, Lowndes. They’ll hate you quite enough under any circumstances.’

  ‘That’s all very well. The man who looks on can talk about the light hand; but you can’t clean a pig-stye with a pen dipped in rose-water. I know my risks; but nothing has happened yet. My servant’s an old Pathan, and he cooks for me.13 They are hardly likely to bribe him, and I don’t accept food from my true friends, as they call themselves. Oh, but it’s weary work! I’d sooner be with you, Spurstow. There’s shooting near your camp.’