Ghost Stories

by E. F. Benson

  ‘No, human,’ said Frank. ‘Rather more human, at least rather less of an ape.’

  ‘Well, that was my first quest,’ he continued, after a moment, ‘the deliberate and unswerving pursuit of joy, and my method, the eager contemplation of Nature. As far as motive went, I dare say it was purely selfish, but as far as effect goes, it seems to me about the best thing one can do for one’s fellow-creatures, for happiness is more infectious than small-pox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I looked at happy things, zealously avoided the sight of anything unhappy, and by degrees a little trickle of the happiness of this blissful world began to filter into me. The trickle grew more abundant, and now, my dear fellow, if I could for a moment divert from me into you one half of the torrent of joy that pours through me day and night, you would throw the world, art, everything aside, and just live, exist. When a man’s body dies, it passes into trees and flowers. Well, that is what I have been trying to do with my soul before death.’

  The servant had brought into the pergola a table with syphons and spirits, and had set a lamp upon it. As Frank spoke he leaned forward towards the other, and Darcy for all his matter-of-fact common sense could have sworn that his companion’s face shone, was luminous in itself. His dark brown eyes glowed from within, the unconscious smile of a child irradiated and transformed his face. Darcy felt suddenly excited, exhilarated.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Go on. I can feel you are somehow telling me sober truth. I dare say you are mad; but I don’t see that matters.’

  Frank laughed again.

  ‘Mad?’ he said. ‘Yes, certainly, if you wish. But I prefer to call it sane. However, nothing matters less than what anybody chooses to call things. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands; just as he put animals in the garden of Eden, for Adam to name if he felt disposed.’

  ‘So by the continual observance and study of things that were happy,’ continued he, ‘I got happiness, I got joy. But seeking it, as I did, from Nature, I got much more which I did not seek, but stumbled upon originally by accident. It is difficult to explain, but I will try.

  ‘About three years ago I was sitting one morning in a place I will show you tomorrow. It is down by the river brink, very green, dappled with shade and sun, and the river passes there through some little clumps of reeds. Well, as I sat there, doing nothing, but just looking and listening, I heard the sound quite distinctly of some flute-like instrument playing a strange unending melody. I thought at first it was some musical yokel on the highway and did not pay much attention. But before long the strangeness and indescribable beauty of the tune struck me. It never repeated itself, but it never came to an end, phrase after phrase ran its sweet course, it worked gradually and inevitably up to a climax, and having attained it, it went on; another climax was reached and another and another. Then with a sudden gasp of wonder I localised where it came from. It came from the reeds and from the sky and from the trees. It was everywhere, it was the sound of life. It was, my dear Darcy, as the Greeks would have said, it was Pan playing on his pipes, the voice of Nature. It was the life-melody, the world-melody.’

  Darcy was far too interested to interrupt, though there was a question he would have liked to ask, and Frank went on.

  ‘Well, for the moment I was terrified, terrified with the impotent horror of nightmare, and I stopped my ears and just ran from the place and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic. Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was nearly six months before I heard them again.’

  ‘Why was that?’ asked Darcy.

  ‘Surely because I had revolted, rebelled, and worst of all been frightened. For I believe that just as there is nothing in the world which so injures one’s body as fear, so there is nothing that so much shuts up the soul. I was afraid, you see, of the one thing in the world which has real existence. No wonder its manifestation was withdrawn.’

  ‘And after six months?’

  ‘After six months one blessed morning I heard the piping again. I wasn’t afraid that time. And since then it has grown louder, it has become more constant. I now hear it often, and I can put myself into such an attitude towards Nature that the pipes will almost certainly sound. And never yet have they played the same tune, it is always something new, something fuller, richer, more complete than before.’

  ‘What do you mean by “such an attitude towards Nature”?’ asked Darcy.

  ‘I can’t explain that; but by translating it into a bodily attitude it is this.’

  Frank sat up for a moment quite straight in his chair, then slowly sunk back with arms outspread and head drooped.

  ‘That;’ he said, ‘an effortless attitude, but open, resting, receptive. It is just that which you must do with your soul.’

  Then he sat up again.

  ‘One word more,’ he said, ‘and I will bore you no further. Nor unless you ask me questions shall I talk about it again. You will find me, in fact, quite sane in my mode of life. Birds and beasts you will see behaving somewhat intimately to me, like that moor-hen, but that is all. I will walk with you, ride with you, play golf with you, and talk with you on any subject you like. But I wanted you on the threshold to know what has happened to me. And one thing more will happen.’

  He paused again, and a slight look of fear crossed his eyes.

  ‘There will be a final revelation,’ he said, ‘a complete and blinding stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full knowledge, the full realisation and comprehension that I am one, just as you are, with life. In reality there is no “me”, no “you”, no “it”. Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life. I know that that is so, but the realisation of it is not yet mine. But it will be, and on that day, so I take it, I shall see Pan. It may mean death, the death of my body, that is, but I don’t care. It may mean immortal, eternal life lived here and now and for ever. Then having gained that, ah, my dear Darcy, I shall preach such a gospel of joy, showing myself as the living proof of the truth, that Puritanism, the dismal religion of sour faces, shall vanish like a breath of smoke, and be dispersed and disappear in the sunlit air. But first the full knowledge must be mine.’

  Darcy watched his face narrowly.

  ‘You are afraid of that moment,’ he said. Frank smiled at him.

  ‘Quite true; you are quick to have seen that. But when it comes I hope I shall not be afraid.’

  For some little time there was silence; then Darcy rose.

  ‘You have bewitched me, you extraordinary boy,’ he said. ‘You have been telling me a fairy-story, and I find myself saying, “Promise me it is true.” ’

  ‘I promise you that,’ said the other.

  ‘And I know I shan’t sleep,’ added Darcy.

  Frank looked at him with a sort of mild wonder as if he scarcely understood.

  ‘Well, what does that matter?’ he said.

  ‘I assure you it does. I am wretched unless I sleep.’

  ‘Of course I can make you sleep if I want,’ said Frank in a rather bored voice.

  ‘Well, do.’

  ‘Very good: go to bed. I’ll come upstairs in ten minutes.’

  Frank busied himself for a little after the other had gone, moving the table back under the awning of the verandah and quenching the lamp. Then he went with his quick silent tread upstairs and into Darcy’s room. The latter was already in bed, but very wide-eyed and wakeful, and Frank with an amused smile of indulgence, as for a fretful child, sat down on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Look at me,’ he said, and Darcy looked.

  ‘The birds are sleeping in the brake,’ said Frank softly, ‘and the winds are asleep. The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its breast. The stars swing sl
ow, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens, and – ’

  He stopped suddenly, gently blew out Darcy’s candle, and left him sleeping.

  Morning brought to Darcy a flood of hard common sense, as clear and crisp as the sunshine that filled his room. Slowly as he woke he gathered together the broken threads of the memories of the evening which had ended, so he told himself, in a trick of common hypnotism. That accounted for it all; the whole strange talk he had had was under a spell of suggestion from the extraordinary vivid boy who had once been a man; all his own excitement, his acceptance of the incredible had been merely the effect of a stronger, more potent will imposed on his own. How strong that will was, he guessed from his own instantaneous obedience to Frank’s suggestion of sleep. And armed with impenetrable common sense he came down to breakfast. Frank had already begun, and was consuming a large plateful of porridge and milk with the most prosaic and healthy appetite.

  ‘Slept well?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. Where did you learn hypnotism?’

  ‘By the side of the river.’

  ‘You talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night,’ remarked Darcy, in a voice prickly with reason.

  ‘Rather. I felt quite giddy. Look, I remembered to order a dreadful daily paper for you. You can read about money markets or politics or cricket matches.’

  Darcy looked at him closely. In the morning light Frank looked even fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the sight of him somehow dinted Darcy’s armour of common sense.

  ‘You are the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw,’ he said. ‘I want to ask you some more questions.’

  ‘Ask away,’ said Frank.

  For the next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions, objections and criticisms on the theory of life, and gradually got out of him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief, then, Frank believed that ‘by lying naked’, as he put it, to the force which controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a way hitherto undreamed of in possessing himself of the essential principle of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in closer union with, the great power itself which caused all life to be, the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human beings, just as it existed in trees and animals; to realise and make living to himself the fact that it was all one, was his sole aim and object.

  Here perhaps Darcy would put in a word of warning.

  ‘Take care,’ he said. ‘To see Pan meant death, did it not.’

  Frank’s eyebrows would rise at this.

  ‘What does that matter?’ he said. ‘True, the Greeks were always right, and they said so, but there is another possibility. For the nearer I get to it, the more living, the more vital and young I become.’

  ‘What then do you expect the final revelation will do for you?’

  ‘I have told you,’ said he. ‘It will make me immortal.’

  But it was not so much from speech and argument that Darcy grew to grasp his friend’s conception, as from the ordinary conduct of his life. They were passing, for instance, one morning down the village street, when an old woman, very bent and decrepit, but with an extraordinary cheerfulness of face, hobbled out from her cottage. Frank instantly stopped when he saw her.

  ‘You old darling! How goes it all?’ he said.

  But she did not answer, her dim old eyes were riveted on his face; she seemed to drink in like a thirsty creature the beautiful radiance which shone there. Suddenly she put her two withered old hands on his shoulders.

  ‘You’re just the sunshine itself,’ she said, and he kissed her and passed on.

  But scarcely a hundred yards further a strange contradiction of such tenderness occurred. A child running along the path towards them fell on its face and set up a dismal cry of fright and pain. A look of horror came into Frank’s eyes, and, putting his fingers in his ears, he fled at full speed down the street, and did not pause till he was out of hearing. Darcy, having ascertained that the child was not really hurt, followed him in bewilderment.

  ‘Are you without pity then?’ he asked. Frank shook his head impatiently.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ he asked. ‘Can’t you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely, throws me back, retards the coming of the great hour! Perhaps when it comes I shall be able to piece that side of life on to the other, on to the true religion of joy. At present I can’t.’

  ‘But the old woman. Was she not ugly?’

  Frank’s radiance gradually returned.

  ‘Ah, no. She was like me. She longed for joy, and knew it when she saw it, the old darling.’

  Another question suggested itself.

  ‘Then what about Christianity?’ asked Darcy.

  ‘I can’t accept it. I can’t believe in any creed of which the central doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer. Perhaps it was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I don’t understand how it was possible. So I leave it alone; my affair is joy.’

  They had come to the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up carolling into the crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them. Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, stood there like some beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were instinct with a vitality that somehow was different from that of other men. And some faint glow from it reached Darcy, some thrill, some vibration from that charged recumbent body passed to him, and for a moment he understood as he had not understood before, despite his persistent questions and the candid answers they received, how real, and how realised by Frank, his idea was.

  Then suddenly the muscles in Frank’s neck became stiff and alert, and he half-raised his head.

  ‘The Pan-pipes, the Pan-pipes,’ he whispered. ‘Close, oh, so close.’

  Very slowly, as if a sudden movement might interrupt the melody, he raised himself and leaned on the elbow of his bent arm. His eyes opened wider, the lower lids drooped as if he focused his eyes on something very far away, and the smile on his face broadened and quivered like sunlight on still water, till the exultance of its happiness was scarcely human. So he remained motionless and rapt for some minutes, then the look of listening died from his face, and he bowed his head satisfied.

  ‘Ah, that was good,’ he said. ‘How is it possible you did not hear? Oh, you poor fellow! Did you really hear nothing?’

  A week of this outdoor and stimulating life did wonders in restoring to Darcy the vigour and health which his weeks of fever had filched from him, and as his normal activity and higher pressure of vitality returned, he seemed to himself to fall even more under the spell which the miracle of Frank’s youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes’ silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank’s idea: ‘But it isn’t possible; it can’t be possible,’ and from the fact of his having to assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling and arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind
. For in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.

  July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain, and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the behaviour of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns of June, lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or making huge rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from tree to tree after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked, but with the same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

  ‘Catch cold?’ he would ask; ‘I’ve forgotten how to do it, I think. I suppose it makes one’s body more sensible always to sleep out of doors. People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and skinless.’

  ‘Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?’ asked Darcy. ‘And where, may I ask?’

  Frank thought a moment.

  ‘I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn,’ he said. ‘For I remember the light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went – where did I go – oh, yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week ago. You were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it is wet.’

  And he went whistling upstairs.

  Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which he was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in a hammock, then the tramp – or probably scamper – underneath the windy and weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The picture of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by the bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the white blaze of moon-shine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour, perhaps a space of silent wide-eyed thought, and then a-wandering through the hushed woods to some other dormitory, alone with his happiness, alone with the joy and the life that suffused and enveloped him, without other thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion with the joy of nature.