“It is too bold and distracting,” I cried. “It is enough to kill us! Do you expect to torment her back? How can it affect us so?”
“Because,” he answered, laying down his violin and wiping his brow, “in the gypsy minor scale the fourth and seventh are augmented. The sixth is diminished. The frequent augmentation of the fourth makes that sense of unrest.”
“Bah! Technical terms make it no plainer,” I said, returning to the window.
He played a whispered, merry discordance, resolving into click of castanets, laugh, and dance of a gypsy camp. Out of the whirl of flying steps and tremolo of tambourines rose a tender voice, asking, denying, sighing, imploring, passing into an over-ruling, long-drawn call that vibrated in widening rings to reach the farthest horizon—nay, beyond land or sea, “east of the sun, west of the moon.” With a rush returned the wild jollity of men’s bass laughter, women’s shrill reply, the stir of the gypsy camp. This dropped behind vague, rolling measures of clouds and chaos, where to and fro floated grotesque goblins of grace-notes like the fancies of a madman; struggling, rising, falling, vain-reaching strains; fierce cries like commands. The music seemed another vital essence thrilling us with its own emotion.
“No more, no more!” I cried, half gasping, and grasping Volz’s arm. “What is it, Dering?”
He had staggered from the bed and was trying to see his watch. “It is just forty-four hours!” he said, pointing to Felipa.
Her eyes were open! We were alarmed as if doing wrong and silently watched her. Fifteen minutes later her lips formed one word:
“Idiots!”
Half an hour after she flung the violin from bed to floor, but would not speak. People began to stir about the house. The prosaic sounds jarred on our strained nerves. We felt brought from another sphere. Volz and I were going, but Felipa’s upraised hand kept us. She sat up, looking a ghastly vision. Turning first toward me she quoted my words:
“‘Better dead than alive!’ True. You knew I would be glad to die. What right had you to bring me back? God’s curses on you! I was dead. Then came agony. I heard your voices. I thought we were all in hell. Then I found how by your evil cunning I was to be forced to live. It was like an awful nightmare. I shall not forget you, nor you me. These very walls shall remember—here, where I have been so tortured no one shall have peace! Fools! Leave me! Never come in this room again!”
We went, all talking at once, Dering angry at her mood; Volz, sorry he had not reached a soothing pianissimo passage; I, owning we had no right to make the test. We saw her but once more, when with a threatening nod toward us she left the house.
From that time a gloom settled over the place. Mrs. Anson proved a hard-faced, cold-hearted, Cape Cod woman, a scold and drudge, who hated us as much as we disliked her. Homesick and unhappy, she soon went East and died. Within a year, Anson was found dead where he had gone hunting in the Saucelito woods, supposed a suicide; Dering was hung by the Vigilantes, and the rest were scattered on the four winds. Volz and I were last to go. The night before we sailed, he for Australia, I for New York, he said:
“I am sorry for those who come after us in this house.”
“Not knowing of any tragedy here,” I said, “they will not feel its influence.”
“They must feel it,” he insisted; “it is written in the Proverbs, ‘Evil shall not depart from his house.’”
Some years later, I was among passengers embarking at New York for California, when there was a cry of “Man overboard!” In the confusion of his rescue, among heartless and pitiful talk, I overheard one man declare that the drowned might be revived.
“Oh, yes!” cried a well-known voice behind me. “But they might not thank you.”
I turned—to find Volz! He was coming out with Wynne, the actor. Enjoying our comradeship on the voyage, on reaching San Francisco we took rooms together, on Bush Street, in an old house with a large garden. Volz became leader of the orchestra, and Wynne, leading man at the same theatre. Lest my folks, a Maine deacon’s family, should think I was on the road to ruin, I told in letters home only of the city missionary in the house.
Volz was hard worked. Wynne was not much liked. My business went wrong. It rained for many weeks; to this we laid the discomfort that grew to weigh on us. Volz wreaked his sense of it on his violin, adding to the torment of Wynne and myself, for to lonesome anxious souls “the demon in music” shows horns and cloven foot in the trying sounds of practice. One Sunday Volz played the “Witches Dance,” the “Dream,” and “The long, long weary day.”
“I can bear it no longer!” said Wynne. “I feel like the haunted Matthias in ‘The Bells.’ If I could feel so when acting such parts, it would make my fortune. But I feel it only here.”
“I think,” said Volz, “it is the gloria fonda bush near the window; the scent is too strong.” He dashed off Strauss’ fretful, conflicting “Hurry and Delay.”
“There, there! It is too much,” said I. “You express my feelings.”
He looked doubtful. “Put it in words,” said he.
“How can I?” I said. “When our firm sent me abroad, I went sight-seeing among old palaces, whose Gobelin tapestries framed in their walls were faded to gray phantoms of pictures, but out of some the thrilling eyes followed me till I could not stay in their range. My feeling here is the uneasy one of being watched.”
“Ha!” said Volz. “You remind me of Heine, when he wrote from Livorno. He knew no Italian, but the old palaces whispered secrets unheard by day. The moon was interpreter, knew the lapidary style, translated to dialect of his heart.”
“‘Strange effects after the moon,’” mused Wynne. “That gives new meaning to Kent’s threat: ‘I’ll make a sop o’ the moonshine of you!’”
Volz went on: “Heine wrote: ‘The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.’”
“Perhaps, like Poe’s hero,” said I, “‘I have imbibed shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.’”
“But I, too,” said Wynne, “feel the unrest of Tannhäuser:
‘Alas! what seek I here, or anywhere,
Whose way of life is like the crumbled stair
That winds and winds about a ruined tower,
And leads no whither.’”
“I am oppressed,” Volz owned, “as if some one in my presence was suffering deeply.”
“I feel,” said Wynne, “as if the scene was not set right for the performance now going on. There is a hitch and drag somewhere—scene-shifters on a strike. Happy are you poets and musicians, who can express what is vague.”
Volz laughed. “As in Liszt’s oratorio of ‘Christus,’” said he, “where a sharp, ear-piercing sostenuto on the piccolo-flute shows the shining of the star of Bethlehem.” He turned to me. “Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ always recalls to me a house you and I know to be under a ban.”
“Haunted?” asked Wynne. “Of all speculative theories, St. Martin’s sends the most cold thrills up one’s back. He said none of the dead come back, but some stay.”
“What we Germans call gebannt—tied to one spot,” said Volz. “But this is no ghost, only a proof of what a German psychologist holds, that the magnetic man is a spirit.”
“Go on, ‘and tell quaint lies’—I like them,” said Wynne.
I told in brief outline, with no names, the tale Volz and I knew, while we strolled to Telegraph Hill, passing five streets blocked by the roving houses common to San Francisco.
Wynne said: “They seem to have minds of their own, with their entrances and exits in a moving drama.”
“Sort of �
�Poor Jo’s,’” said I.
“Castles in chess,” said Volz.
“Io-like,” said Wynne, “with a gad in their hearts that forever drives them on.”
A few foreign sailors lounged on the hill top, looking at the view. The wind blew such a gale we did not stay. The steps we had known, cut in the side, were gone. Where the old house used to be, goats were browsing.
“Perchance we do inhabit it but now,” mockingly cried Wynne; “methinks it must be so.”
“Then,” said Volz, thoughtfully, “it might be what Germans call ‘far-working’—acted in distance—that affects us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Do you know anything of her now?”
“I know she went to Mexico,” said he; “that is all.”
“What is ‘far-working?’” asked Wynne. “If I could act in the distance, and here too—‘what larks!’”
“Yes—‘if,’” said I. “Think how all our lives turn on that pivot. Suppose Hawthorne’s offer to join Wilkes’ exploring expedition had been taken!”
“Only to wills that know no ‘if’ is ‘far-working’ possible,” said Volz. “Substance or space can no more hinder this force than the one of mineral magnetism. Passavent joins it with pictures falling, or watches stopping at the time of a death. In sleep-walking, some kinds of illness, or nearness of death, the nervous ether is not so closely allied to its material conductors, the nerves, and may be loosened to act from afar, the surest where blood or feeling makes attraction or repulsion.”
Wynne in the two voices of the play repeated:
“VICTOR.—Where is the gentleman?
CHISPE.—As the old song says:
‘His body is in Segovia,
His soul is in Madrid.’”
We could learn about the house we were in only that five families had moved in and out during the last year. Wynne resolved to shake off the gloom that wrapped us. In struggles to defy it, he on the strength of a thousand-dollar benefit, made one payment on the house and began repairs.
On an off-night he was vainly trying to study a new part. Volz advised the relief to his nerves of reciting the dream scene from “The Bells,” reminding him he had compared it with his restlessness there. Wynne denied it.
“Yes,” said Volz, “where the mesmerizer forces Matthias to confess.”
But Wynne refused, as if vexed, till Volz offered to show in music his own mood, and I agreed to read some rhymes about mine. Volz was long tuning his violin.
“I feel,” he said, “as if the passers-by would hear a secret. Music is such a subtle expression of emotion—like flower-odor rolls far and affects the stranger. Hearken! In Heine’s ‘Reisebilder,’ as the cross was thrown ringing on the banquet table of the gods, they grew dumb and pale, and even paler till they melted in mist. So shall you at the long-drawn wail of my violin grow breathless, and fade from each other’s sight.”
The music closed round us, and we waited in its deep solitude. One brief, sad phrase fell from airy heights to lowest depths into a sea of sound, whose harmonious eddies as they widened breathed of passion and pain, now swooning, now reviving, with odd pauses and sighs that rose to cries of despair, but the tormenting first strain recurring fainter and fainter, as if drowning, drowning, drowned—yet floating back for repeated last plaint, as if not to be quelled, and closing, as it began, the whole.
As I read the name of my verses, Volz murmured: “Les Nuits Blanches. No. 4. Stephen Heller.”
SLEEPLESS NIGHTS.
Against the garden’s mossy paling
I lean, and wish the night away,
Whose faint, unequal shadows trailing
Seem but a dream of those of day.
Sleep burdens blossom, bud, and leaf,
My soul alone aspires, dilates,
Yearns to forget its care and grief—
No bath of sleep its pain abates.
How dread these dreams of wide-eyed nights!
What is, and is not, both I rue,
My wild thoughts fly like wand’ring kites,
No peace falls with this balmy dew.
Through slumb’rous stillness, scarcely stirred
By sudden trembles, as when shifts
O’er placid pool some skimming bird,
Its Lethean bowl a poppy lifts.
If one deep draught my doubts could solve,
The world might bubble down its brim,
Like Cleopatra’s pearl dissolve,
With all my dreams within its rim.
What should I know but calm repose?
How feel, recalling this lost sphere?
Alas! the fabled poppy shows
Upon its bleeding heart—a tear!
Wynne unwillingly began to recite: “‘I fear nothing, but dreams are dreams—’”
He stammered, could not go on, and fell to the floor. We got him to bed. He never spoke sanely after. His wild fancies appalled us watching him all night.
“Avaunt Sathanas! That’s not my cue,” he muttered. “A full house tonight. How could Talma forget how the crowd looked, and fancy it a pack of skeletons? Tell Volz to keep the violins playing through this scene, it works me up as well as thrills the audience. Oh, what tiresome nights I have lately, always dreaming of scenes where rival women move, as in ‘Court and Stage,’ where, all masked, the king makes love to Frances Stewart before the queen’s face! How do I try to cure it? ‘And being thus frighted, swear a prayer or two and sleep again.’ Madame, you’re late; you’ve too little rouge; you’ll look ghastly. We’re not called yet; let’s rehearse our scene. Now, then, I enter left, pass to the window. You cry ‘is this true?’ and faint. All crowd about. Quick curtain.”
Volz and I looked at each other.
“Can our magnetism make his senses so sharp that he knows what is in our minds?” he asked me.
“Nonsense!” I said. “Memory, laudanum, and whisky.”
“There,” Wynne went on, “the orchestra is stopping. They’ve rung up the curtain. Don’t hold me. The stage waits, yet how can I go outside my door to step on dead bodies? Street and sidewalk are knee-deep with them. They rise and curse me for disturbing them. I lift my cane to strike. It turns to a snake, whose slimy body writhes in my hand. Trying to hold it from biting me, my nails cut my palm till blood streams to drown the snake.”
He awed us not alone from having no control of his thoughts, but because there came now and then a strange influx of emotion as if other souls passed in and out of his body.
“Is this hell?” he groaned. “What blank darkness! Where am I? What is that infernal music haunting me through all space? If I could only escape it I need not go back to earth—to that room where I feel choked, where the very wall paper frets me with its flaunting birds flying to and fro, mocking my fettered state. ‘Here, here in the very den of the wolf!’ Hallo, Benvolio, call-boy’s hunting you. Romeo’s gone on.
‘See where he steals—
Locked in some gloomy covert under key
Of cautionary silence, with his arms
Threaded, like these cross-boughs, in sorrow’s knot.’
What is this dread that weighs like a nightmare? ‘I do not fear; like Macbeth, I only inhabit trembling.’ ‘For one of them—she is in hell already, and burns, poor soul! For the other’—Ah! Must I die here, alone in the woods, felled by a coward, Indian-like, from behind a tree? None of the boys will know. ‘I just now come from a whole world of mad women that had almost—what, is she dead?’ Poor Felipa!”
“Did you tell him her name?” I asked Volz.
“No,” said he. “Can one man’s madness be another’s real life?”
“Blood was spilt—the avenger’s wing hovered above my house,” raved Wynne. “What are these ligh
ts, hundreds of them—serpent’s eyes? Is it the audience—coiled, many-headed monster, following me round the world? Why do they hiss? I’ve played this part a hundred times. ‘Taught by Rage, and Hunger, and Despair?’ Do they, full-fed, well-clothed, light-hearted, know how to judge me? ‘A plague on both your houses!’ What is that flame? Fire that consumes my vitals—spon-ta-neous combustion! It is then possible. Water! water!”
The doctor said there had been some great strain on Wynne’s mind. He sank fast, though we did all we could. Toward morning I turned to Volz with the words:
“He is dead.”
The city missionary was passing the open door. He grimly muttered:
“Better dead than alive!”
“My God! say not that!” cried Volz. “The nerve which hears is last to die. He may know—”
He faltered. We stood aghast. The room grew suddenly familiar. I tore off a strip of the gray tint on the walls. Under it we found the old paper with its bright macaws.
“Ah, ha!” Volz said; “will you now deny my theory of ‘far-working?’”
Dazed, I could barely murmur: “Then people can be affected by it!”
“Certainly,” said he, “as rubbed glasses gain electric power.”
Within a week we sailed—he for Brazil, I for New York.
Several years after, at Sacramento, Arne, an artist I had known abroad, found me on the overland train, and on reaching San Francisco urged me to go where he lodged.
“I am low-spirited here,” he said; “I don’t know why.”
I stopped short on the crowded wharf. “Where do you live?” I asked.
“Far up Market Street,” said he.
“What sort of a house?” I insisted.
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack: 25 Classic Ghost Stories Page 27