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The Best Psychic Stories

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Title: The Best Psychic Stories

Editor: Joseph Lewis French


        
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Language: English

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file was produced from images generously made available
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                             The Best Psychic Stories

                            _Edited with a Preface by_

                               Joseph Lewis French

         _Editor "Great Ghost Stories," "Masterpieces of Mystery," etc._


    _Introduction by_
    Dorothy Scarborough, Ph.D.

    _Lecturer in English, Columbia University
    Author of "The Supernatural in English Literature,"
    "From a Southern Porch," etc._


    BONI & LIVERIGHT
    NEW YORK

    Copyright, 1920, by
    Boni & Liveright, Inc.

    Printed in the Unites States of America




PREFACE


The case for the "psychic" element in literature rests on a very old
foundation; it reaches back to the ancient masters,--the men who wrote
the Greek tragedies. Remorse will ever seem commonplace alongside the
furies. Ever and always the shadow of the supernatural invites, pursues
us. As the art of literature has progressed it has grown along with it.
To-day there is a whole new school of writers of Ghost-Stories, and the
domain of the invisible is being invaded by explorers in many paths. We
do not believe so much more, perhaps, that is, we do not so openly
express a belief, but art has finally and frankly claimed the
supernatural for its own. One discerning authority even goes so far as
to assert that the borders of its domain will be greatly enlarged in the
wonderful new field of the screen.

There is no motive in a story, no image in poetry, that can give us
quite the thrill of a supernatural idea. If we were formally charged
with this we might resent the imputation, but the evidence has persisted
from the beginning, lives on every hand, and multiplies daily. What we
have been in the habit of calling the "machinery" of the old Greek
drama--its supernatural effects--has come finally to be an art
cultivated with care at the present hour, and has given us some
wonderful new writers. In fact, few of the best masters for a generation
now have been able to resist its persistent and abiding charm. Every
writer of true imagination, almost without exception, including even
certain realists, has given us at least one story, long or short, in
which the central motive is purely psychical in the Greek sense of the
word.

The whole subject opens up a virgin field which has after all only begun
to be tilled. Within the coming generation we may look for great artists
to devote their whole powers to it, as Algernon Blackwood is doing
to-day. A simple underlying reason is enough to account for it all--_the
new field imposes simply no limit on the imagination_. In addition to
all that science has taught us, there is illimitable store of myth and
legend to aid, to draw from, to work in, to work over, as Lord Dunsany
has shown us. It is the most significant movement in literature at the
present hour, and whether it is supported by a special background of
interest--as at present in spiritism--or not, the assertion is logical
that it is creating a new body of fictional literature of permanent
importance for the first time in the history of literature. The human
comedy seems to have been exploited to its final limits; as the art of
the novel, the art of the stage, but too sadly prove to-day. We have
turned outward for new thrills to the supernatural and we are getting
them.

It only remains to be added that the present great interest in
spiritualism and allied phenomena has made necessary the addition of
certain material of a "literal" character which we believe will be found
quite as interesting by the general reader as the purely literary
portion of the book.

JOSEPH LEWIS FRENCH




CONTENTS


PREFACE _Joseph Lewis French_

INTRODUCTION _Dorothy Scarborough_

WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG _Jack London_

THE RETURN _Algernon Blackwood_

THE SECOND GENERATION _Algernon Blackwood_

JOSEPH--A STORY _Katherine Rickford_

THE CLAVECIN--BRUGES _George Wharton Edwards_

LIGEIA _Edgar Allan Poe_

THE SYLPH AND THE FATHER _Elsa Barker_

A GHOST _Lafcadio Hearn_

THE EYES OF THE PANTHER _Ambrose Bierce_

PHOTOGRAPHING INVISIBLE BEINGS _William T. Stead_

THE SIN-EATER _Fiona Macleod_

GHOSTS IN SOLID FORM _Gambier Bolton_

THE PHANTOM ARMIES SEEN IN FRANCE _Hereward Carrington_

THE PORTAL OF THE UNKNOWN _Andrew Jackson Davis_

THE SUPERNORMAL: EXPERIENCES _St. John D. Seymour_

NATURE-SPIRITS, OR ELEMENTALS _Nizida_

A WITCH'S DEN _Helena Blavatsky_

SOME REMARKABLE EXPERIENCES OF FAMOUS PERSONS _Dr. Walter F. Prince_




INTRODUCTION

THE PSYCHIC IN LITERATURE


War, that relentless disturber of boundaries and of traditions in a
spiritual as well as a material sense, has brought a tremendous revival
of interest in the life after death and the possibility of communication
between the living and the dead. As France became nearer to millions
over here because our soldiers lived there for a few months, as French
soil will forever be holy ground because our dead rest there, so the far
country of the soul likewise seems nearer because of those young
adventurers. The conflict which changed the map of Europe has in the
minds of many effaced the boundaries between this world and the world
beyond. Winifred Kirkland, in her book, _The New Death_, discusses the
new concept of death, and the change in our standards that it is making.
"We are used to speaking of this or that friend's philosophy of life;
the time has now come when every one of us who is to live at peace with
his own brain must possess also a philosophy of death." This New Death,
she says, is so far mainly an immense yearning receptivity, an
unprecedented humility of brain and of heart toward all implications of
survival. She believes that it is an influence which is entering the
lives of the people as a whole, not a movement of the intellectuals, nor
the result of psychical research propaganda, but arising from the
simple, elemental emotions of the soul, from human love and longing for
reassurance of continued life.

"If a man die, shall he live again?" has been propounded ever since
Job's agonized inquiry. Now numbers are asking in addition, "Can we have
communication with the dead?" Science, long derisive, is sympathetic to
the questioning, and while many believe and many doubt, the subject is
one that interests more people than ever before. Professor James Hyslop,
Secretary of the American Society for Psychical Research, believes that
the war has had great influence in arousing new interest in psychical
subjects and that tremendous spiritual discoveries may come from it.

Literature, always a little ahead of life, or at least in advance of
general thinking, has in the more recent years been acutely conscious of
this new influence. Poetry, the drama, the novel, the short story, have
given affirmative answer to the question of the soul's survival after
death. No other element has so largely entered into the tissue of recent
literature as has the supernatural, which now we meet in all forms in
the writings of all lands. And no aspect of the ghostly art is more
impressive or more widely used than the introduction of the spirit of
the dead seeking to manifest itself to the living. No thoughtful person
can fail to be interested in a theme which has so affected literature as
has the ghostly, even though he may disbelieve what the Psychical
Researchers hold to be established.

Man's love for the supernatural, which is one of the most natural things
about him, was never more marked than now. Man's imagination, ever
vaster than his environment, overleaps the barriers of time and space
and claims all worlds as eminent domain, so that literature, which he
has the power to create, as he cannot create his material surroundings,
possesses a dramatic intensity and an epic sweep unknown in actuality.
Literature shows what humanity really is and longs to be. Man, feeling
belittled by his petty round of uninspiring days, longs for a larger
life. He yearns for traffic with immortal beings that can augment his
wisdom, that can bring comfort to his soul dismayed and bewildered by
life. He reaches out for a power beyond his puny strength. Aware how
relentlessly time ticks away his little hour, he craves companionship
with the eternal spirits. Ignorant of what lies before him in the life
to which he speeds so fast, he would take counsel of those who know,
would ask about the customs of the country where presently he will be a
citizen. He feels so terribly alone that he cries out like a child in
the dark for supermortal companionship.

Literature, which is both a cause and an effect of man's interest in the
supernatural as in anything else, reflects his longings and records his
cries. And when we read the imaginings of the different generations, we
find that the spirit of the dead is represented almost everywhere.
Before poetry and fiction were recorded, there were singers and
story-tellers by the fire to give to their listeners the thrill that
comes from art. And what thrill is comparable to that which comes from
contact with the supermortal? The earliest literature relates the
appearance of the spirits of those who have died as coming back to
comfort or to take vengeance on the living, but always as sentient,
intelligent, and with an interest in the earth they have left. All
through the centuries the wraith has survived in literature, has flitted
pallidly across the pages of poetry, story and play, with a sad
wistfulness, a forlorn dignity.

A double relation exists between the literature and the records of the
Psychical Research Society. Lacy Collison-Morley, in his _Greek and
Roman Ghost Stories_, speaks of the similarity between ancient tales of
spirits and records of recent instances. "There are in the Fourth Book
of _Gregory the Great's Dialogues_ a number of stories of the passing of
souls which are curiously like some of those collected by the Psychical
Research Society," he says. Possibly human personality is much the same
in all lands and all times.

Conversely, some of the best examples of ghostly literature have had
their inspiration in the records of the society, Henry James's _The Turn
of the Screw_ being a notable example. Algernon Blackwood, that
extraordinary adapter of psychic material to fiction, makes frequent
mention of the Psychical Research Society, and uses many aspects of the
psychical in his fiction. Innumerable stories, novels, plays and poems
have been written to show the nearness of the dead to the living, and
the thinness of the veil that separates the two worlds. There is deep
pathos in the concept of the longing felt by the dead and living alike
to speak with each other, to rend the dividing veil, which adds a
poignancy to literature, even for readers incredulous of the possibility
of such communication. There are many who are unconvinced of the reality
of the messages in _Raymond_, for instance,--yet who could fail to be
touched by the delicate art with which Barrie suggests the dead son's
return in his play, _The Well-Remembered Voice_? While one may be
repelled by what he feels is fraud and trickery in some of the psychic
records, it is impossible not to be moved by such an impressive piece of
symbolism as Granville Barker's _Souls on Fifth_, where the lonely,
futile spirits of the dead are represented as hovering near the place
they knew the best, seeking piteously to win some recognition from the
living. The repulsive aspects of spirit manifestations have been treated
many times and with power, as in Joseph Hergesheimer's _The Meeker
Ritual_, to give one very recent example. The subject has interested the
minds of many writers who have dealt with it satirically or
sympathetically, or with a curious mixture of scoffing and respect, as
did Browning in _Sludge, the Medium_. Even such pronounced realists as
William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland have written novels dealing with
attempts at spirit communication.

Any subject that has won so incontestable a place in our literature as
this has, possesses a right to our thought, whatever be our attitude of
acceptance or rejection of its claims to actuality. No person wishes to
be ignorant of what the world is thinking with reference to a matter so
important as the spirit. Hence this volume, _The Best Psychic Stories_,
in presenting these studies in the occult, will have interest for a wide
range of readers, and Mr. French, the editor, has shown critical
discrimination and extensive knowledge of the subject. Many who are
already interested in psychic phenomena will be glad to be informed
concerning recent and startling manifestations recounted by special
investigators. The sincerity of a man like W. T. Stead, well known and
respected on both sides of the Atlantic, cannot be doubted, so that his
article on _Photographing Invisible Beings_ will have unusual weight.
Hereward Carrington, author of various books on psychic subjects, and
considered an authority in his field, gives in _The Phantom Armies Seen
in France_ a report of occult phenomena widely believed in during the
war.

Helena Blavatsky, author of _A Witch's Den_, will be remembered as the
sensational medium who mystified experimenters in various lands a few
years ago. While most of us can be content not to touch a ghost, we may
find subject for surprise and wonder in Gambier Bolton's _Ghosts in
Solid Form_, describing spirits that can be weighed and put to material
tests, while Dr. Walter H. Prince, well known as a psychic investigator,
relates remarkable experiments of famous persons, that challenge
explanation on purely physical bases. These accounts show that modern
scientific investigation of spiritual manifestations can be made as
enthralling as fiction or drama. Hamlin Garland remarks in a recent
article, _The Spirit-World on Trial_, "When the medium consented to
enter the laboratory of the physicist, a new era in the study of psychic
phenomena began."

Even those who refuse credence to spirit manifestations in fact, but who
appreciate the art with which they are shown in literature, should read
with interest the stories given here. The genius of Edgar Allan Poe was
never more impressive than in his studies of the supernatural, and
_Ligeia_ has a dramatic art unsurpassed even by Poe. The tense economy
with which Ambrose Bierce could evoke a dreadful spirit is evident in
_The Eyes of the Panther_, and the haunting symbolism of Fiona Macleod's
_The Sin-Eater_ is unforgetable. Lafcadio Hearn, author of _A Ghost_,
held the belief that there was no great artist in any land, and
certainly no Anglo-Saxon writer, who had not distinguished himself in
his use of the supernatural. The subject of the soul's survival after
death and its attempts to reveal itself to those still in the folding
flesh is of interest to every rational person, whether as a matter of
scientific concern or merely as an aspect of literary art. And the
possibilities for further use of the psychic in literature are as
alluring as they are illimitable.

    DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH

    _New York City
    March 29, 1920_




THE BEST PSYCHIC STORIES




WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG[1]

BY JACK LONDON

[Footnote 1: By permission of The Century Co.]


I

He was a very quiet, self-possessed sort of man, sitting a moment on top
of the wall to sound the damp darkness for warnings of the dangers it
might conceal. But the plummet of his hearing brought nothing to him
save the moaning of wind through invisible trees and the rustling of
leaves on swaying branches. A heavy fog drifted and drove before the
wind, and though he could not see this fog, the wet of it blew upon his
face, and the wall on which he sat was wet.

Without noise he had climbed to the top of the wall from the outside,
and without noise he dropped to the ground on the inside. From his
pocket he drew an electric night-stick, but he did not use it. Dark as
the way was, he was not anxious for light. Carrying the night-stick in
his hand, his finger on the button, he advanced through the darkness.
The ground was velvety and springy to his feet, being carpeted with dead
pine-needles and leaves and mold which evidently had been undisturbed
for years. Leaves and branches brushed against his body, but so dark was
it that he could not avoid them. Soon he walked with his hand stretched
out gropingly before him, and more than once the hand fetched up against
the solid trunks of massive trees. All about him he knew were these
trees; he sensed the loom of them everywhere; and he experienced a
strange feeling of microscopic smallness in the midst of great bulks
leaning toward him to crush him. Beyond, he knew, was the house, and he
expected to find some trail or winding path that would lead easily to
it.

Once, he found himself trapped. On every side he groped against trees
and branches, or blundered into thickets of underbrush, until there
seemed no way out. Then he turned on his light, circumspectly, directing
its rays to the ground at his feet. Slowly and carefully he moved it
about him, the white brightness showing in sharp detail all the
obstacles to his progress. He saw an opening between huge-trunked trees,
and advanced through it, putting out the light and treading on dry
footing as yet protected from the drip of the fog by the dense foliage
overhead. His sense of direction was good, and he knew he was going
toward the house.

And then the thing happened--the thing unthinkable and unexpected. His
descending foot came down upon something that was soft and alive, and
that arose with a snort under the weight of his body. He sprang clear,
and crouched for another spring, anywhere, tense and expectant, keyed
for the onslaught of the unknown. He waited a moment, wondering what
manner of animal it was that had arisen from under his foot and that now
made no sound nor movement and that must be crouching and waiting just
as tensely and expectantly as he. The strain became unbearable. Holding
the night-stick before him, he pressed the button, saw, and screamed
aloud in terror. He was prepared for anything, from a frightened calf or
fawn to a belligerent lion, but he was not prepared for what he saw. In
that instant his tiny searchlight, sharp and white, had shown him what a
thousand years would not enable him to forget--a man, huge and blond,
yellow-haired and yellow-bearded, naked except for soft-tanned moccasins
and what seemed a goat-skin about his middle. Arms and legs were bare,
as were his shoulders and most of his chest. The skin was smooth and
hairless, but browned by sun and wind, while under it heavy muscles were
knotted like fat snakes.

Still, this alone, unexpected as it well was, was not what had made the
man scream out. What had caused his terror was the unspeakable ferocity
of the face, the wild-animal glare of the blue eyes scarcely dazzled by
the light, the pine-needles matted and clinging in the beard and hair,
and the whole formidable body crouched and in the act of springing at
him. Practically in the instant he saw all this, and while his scream
still rang, the thing leaped, he flung his night-stick full at it, and
threw himself to the ground. He felt its feet and shins strike against
his ribs, and he bounded up and away while the thing itself hurled
onward in a heavy crashing fall into the underbrush.

As the noise of the fall ceased, the man stopped and on hands and knees
waited. He could hear the thing moving about, searching for him, and he
was afraid to advertise his location by attempting further flight. He
knew that inevitably he would crackle the underbrush and be pursued.
Once he drew out his revolver, then changed his mind. He had recovered
his composure and hoped to get away without noise. Several times he
heard the thing beating up the thickets for him, and there were moments
when it, too, remained still and listened. This gave an idea to the man.
One of his hands was resting on a chunk of dead wood. Carefully, first
feeling about him in the darkness to know that the full swing of his arm
was clear, he raised the chunk of wood and threw it. It was not a large
piece, and it went far, landing noisily in a bush. He heard the thing
bound into the bush, and at the same time himself crawled steadily away.
And on hands and knees, slowly and cautiously, he crawled on, till his
knees were wet on the soggy mold. When he listened he heard naught but
the moaning wind and the drip-drip of the fog from the branches. Never
abating his caution, he stood erect and went on to the stone wall, over
which he climbed and dropped down to the road outside.

Feeling his way in a clump of bushes, he drew out a bicycle and prepared
to mount. He was in the act of driving the gear around with his foot for
the purpose of getting the opposite pedal in position, when he heard the
thud of a heavy body that landed lightly and evidently on its feet. He
did not wait for more, but ran, with hands on the handles of his
bicycle, until he was able to vault astride the saddle, catch the
pedals, and start a spurt. Behind he could hear the quick thud-thud of
feet on the dust of the road, but he drew away from it and lost it.

Unfortunately, he had started away from the direction of town and was
heading higher up into the hills. He knew that on this particular road
there were no cross roads. The only way back was past that terror, and
he could not steel himself to face it. At the end of half an hour,
finding himself on an ever increasing grade, he dismounted. For still
greater safety, leaving the wheel by the roadside, he climbed through a
fence into what he decided was a hillside pasture, spread a newspaper on
the ground, and sat down.

"Gosh!" he said aloud, mopping the sweat and fog from his face.

And "Gosh!" he said once again, while rolling a cigarette and as he
pondered the problem of getting back.

But he made no attempt to go back. He was resolved not to face that road
in the dark, and with head bowed on knees, he dozed, waiting for
daylight.

How long afterward he did not know, he was awakened by the yapping bark
of a young coyote. As he looked about and located it on the brow of the
hill behind him, he noted the change that had come over the face of the
night. The fog was gone; the stars and moon were out; even the wind had
died down. It had transformed into a balmy California summer night. He
tried to doze again, but the yap of the coyote disturbed him. Half
asleep, he heard a wild and eery chant. Looking about him, he noticed
that the coyote had ceased its noise and was running away along the
crest of the hill, and behind it, in full pursuit, no longer chanting,
ran the naked creature he had encountered in the garden. It was a young
coyote, and it was being overtaken when the chase passed from view. The
man trembled as with a chill as he started to his feet, clambered over
the fence, and mounted his wheel. But it was his chance and he knew it.
The terror was no longer between him and Mill Valley.

He sped at a breakneck rate down the hill, but in the turn at the
bottom, in the deep shadows, he encountered a chuck-hole and pitched
headlong over the handle bar.

"It's sure not my night," he muttered, as he examined the broken fork of
the machine.

Shouldering the useless wheel, he trudged on. In time he came to the
stone wall, and, half disbelieving his experience, he sought in the road
for tracks, and found them--moccasin tracks, large ones, deep-bitten
into the dust at the toes. It was while bending over them, examining,
that again he heard the eery chant. He had seen the thing pursue the
coyote, and he knew he had no chance on a straight run. He did not
attempt it, contenting himself with hiding in the shadows on the off
side of the road.

And again he saw the thing that was like a naked man, running swiftly
and lightly and singing as it ran. Opposite him it paused, and his heart
stood still. But instead of coming toward his hiding-place, it leaped
into the air, caught the branch of a roadside tree, and swung swiftly
upward, from limb to limb, like an ape. It swung across the wall, and a
dozen feet above the top, into the branches of another tree, and dropped
out of sight to the ground. The man waited a few wondering minutes, then
started on.


II

Dave Slotter leaned belligerently against the desk that barred the way
to the private office of James Ward, senior partner of the firm of Ward,
Knowles & Co. Dave was angry. Every one in the outer office had looked
him over suspiciously, and the man who faced him was excessively
suspicious.

"You just tell Mr. Ward it's important," he urged.

"I tell you he is dictating and cannot be disturbed," was the answer.
"Come to-morrow."

"To-morrow will be too late. You just trot along and tell Mr. Ward it's
a matter of life and death."

The secretary hesitated and Dave seized the advantage.

"You just tell him I was across the bay in Mill Valley last night, and
that I want to put him wise to something."

"What name?" was the query.

"Never mind the name. He don't know me."

When Dave was shown into the private office, he was still in the
belligerent frame of mind, but when he saw a large fair man whirl in a
revolving chair from dictating to a stenographer to face him, Dave's
demeanor abruptly changed. He did not know why it changed, and he was
secretly angry with himself.

"You are Mr. Ward?" Dave asked with a fatuousness that still further
irritated him. He had never intended it at all.

"Yes," came the answer. "And who are you?"

"Harry Bancroft," Dave lied. "You don't know me, and my name don't
matter."

"You sent in word that you were in Mill Valley last night?"

"You live there, don't you?" Dave countered, looking suspiciously at the
stenographer.

"Yes. What do you mean to see me about? I am very busy."

"I'd like to see you alone, sir."

Mr. Ward gave him a quick, penetrating look, hesitated, then made up his
mind.

"That will do for a few minutes, Miss Potter."

The girl arose, gathered her notes together, and passed out. Dave looked
at Mr. James Ward wonderingly, until that gentleman broke his train of
inchoate thought.

"Well?"

"I was over in Mill Valley last night," Dave began confusedly.

"I've heard that before. What do you want?"

And Dave proceeded in the face of a growing conviction that was
unbelievable.

"I was at your house, or in the grounds, I mean."

"What were you doing there?"

"I came to break in," Dave answered in all frankness. "I heard you lived
all alone with a Chinaman for cook, and it looked good to me. Only I
didn't break in. Something happened that prevented. That's why I'm here.
I come to warn you. I found a wild man loose in your grounds--a regular
devil. He could pull a guy like me to pieces. He gave me the run of my
life. He don't wear any clothes to speak of, he climbs trees like a
monkey, and he runs like a deer. I saw him chasing a coyote, and the
last I saw of it, by God, he was gaining on it."

Dave paused and looked for the effect that would follow his words. But
no effect came. James Ward was quietly curious, and that was all.

"Very remarkable, very remarkable," he murmured. "A wild man, you say.
Why have you come to tell me?"

"To warn you of your danger. I'm something of a hard proposition myself,
but I don't believe in killing people ... that is, unnecessarily. I
realized that you was in danger. I thought I'd warn you. Honest, that's
the game. Of course, if you wanted to give me anything for my trouble,
I'd take it. That was in my mind, too. But I don't care whether you give
me anything or not. I've warned you anyway, and done my duty."

Mr. Ward meditated and drummed on the surface of his desk. Dave noticed
that his hands were large, powerful, withal well-cared for despite their
dark sunburn. Also, he noted what had already caught his eye before--a
tiny strip of flesh-colored courtplaster on the forehead over one eye.
And still the thought that forced itself into his mind was unbelievable.

Mr. Ward took a wallet from his inside coat pocket, drew out a
greenback, and passed it to Dave, who noted as he pocketed it that it
was for twenty dollars.

"Thank you," said Mr. Ward, indicating that the interview was at an end.
"I shall have the matter investigated. A wild man running loose _is_
dangerous."

But so quiet a man was Mr. Ward, that Dave's courage returned. Besides,
a new theory had suggested itself. The wild man was evidently Mr. Ward's
brother, a lunatic privately confined. Dave had heard of such things.
Perhaps Mr. Ward wanted it kept quiet. That was why he had given him the
twenty dollars.

"Say," Dave began, "now I come to think of it that wild man looked a lot
like you--"

That was as far as Dave got, for at that moment he witnessed a
transformation and found himself gazing into the same unspeakably
ferocious blue eyes of the night before, at the same clutching
talon-like hands, and at the same formidable bulk in the act of
springing upon him. But this time Dave had no night-stick to throw, and
he was caught by the biceps of both arms in a grip so terrific that it
made him groan with pain. He saw the large white teeth exposed, for all
the world as a dog's about to bite. Mr. Ward's beard brushed his face as
the teeth went in for the grip of his throat. But the bite was not
given. Instead, Dave felt the other's body stiffen as with an iron
restraint, and then he was flung aside, without effort but with such
force that only the wall stopped his momentum and dropped him gasping to
the floor.

"What do you mean by coming here and trying to blackmail me?" Mr. Ward
was snarling at him. "Here, give me back that money."

Dave passed the bill back without a word.

"I thought you came here with good intentions. I know you now. Let me
see and hear no more of you, or I'll put you in prison where you belong.
Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir," Dave gasped.

"Then go."

And Dave went, without further word, both his biceps aching intolerably
from the bruise of that tremendous grip. As his hand rested on the door
knob, he was stopped.

"You were lucky," Mr. Ward was saying, and Dave noted that his face and
eyes were cruel and gloating and proud. "You were lucky. Had I wanted, I
could have torn your muscles out of your arms and thrown them in the
waste basket there."

"Yes, sir," said Dave; and absolute conviction vibrated in his voice.

He opened the door and passed out. The secretary looked at him
interrogatively.

"Gosh!" was all Dave vouchsafed, and with this utterance passed out of
the offices and the story.


III

James G. Ward was forty years of age, a successful business man, and
very unhappy. For forty years he had vainly tried to solve a problem
that was really himself and that with increasing years became more and
more a woeful affliction. In himself he was two men, and,
chronologically speaking, these men were several thousand years or so
apart. He had studied the question of dual personality probably more
profoundly than any half dozen of the leading specialists in that
intricate and mysterious psychological field. In himself he was a
different case from any that had been recorded. Even the most fanciful
flights of the fiction-writers had not quite hit upon him. He was not a
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in
Kipling's _Greatest Story in the World_. His two personalities were so
mixed that they were practically aware of themselves and of each other
all the time.

His one self was that of a man whose rearing and education were modern
and who had lived through the latter part of the nineteenth century and
well into the first decade of the twentieth. His other self he had
located as a savage and a barbarian living under the primitive
conditions of several thousand years before. But which self was he, and
which was the other, he could never tell. For he was both selves, and
both selves all the time. Very rarely indeed did it happen that one self
did not know what the other was doing. Another thing was that he had no
visions nor memories of the past in which that early self had lived.
That early self lived in the present; but while it lived in the present,
it was under the compulsion to live the way of life that must have been
in that distant past.

In his childhood he had been a problem to his father and mother, and to
the family doctors, though never had they come within a thousand miles
of hitting upon the clue to his erratic conduct. Thus, they could not
understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive
activity at night. When they found him wandering along the hallways at
night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they
decided he was a somnambulist. In reality he was wide-eyed awake and
merely under the night-roaming compulsion of his early life. Questioned
by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of
having the revelation contemptuously labeled and dismissed as "dreams."

The point was, that as twilight and evening came on he became wakeful.
The four walls of a room were an irk and a restraint. He heard a
thousand voices whispering to him through the darkness. The night
called to him, for he was, for that period of the twenty-four hours,
essentially a night-prowler. But nobody understood, and never again did
he attempt to explain. They classified him as a sleep-walker and took
precautions accordingly--precautions that very often were futile. As his
childhood advanced, he grew more cunning, so that the major portion of
all his nights were spent in the open at realizing his other self. As a
result, he slept in the forenoons. Morning studies and schools were
impossible, and it was discovered that only in the afternoons, under
private teachers, could he be taught anything. Thus was his modern self
educated and developed.

But a problem, as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little
demon of insensate cruelty and viciousness. The family medicos privately
adjudged him a mental monstrosity and a degenerate. Such few boy
companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all
afraid of him. He could outclimb, outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them;
while none dared fight with him. He was too terribly strong, too madly
furious.

When nine years of age he ran away to the hills, where he flourished,
night-prowling, for seven weeks before he was discovered and brought
home. The marvel was how he had managed to subsist and keep in condition
during that time. They did not know, and he never told them, of the
rabbits he had killed, of the quail, young and old, he had captured and
devoured, of the farmers' chicken-roosts he had raided, nor of the
cave-lair he had made and carpeted with dry leaves and grasses and in
which he had slept in warmth and comfort, through the forenoons of many
days.

At college he was notorious for his sleepiness and stupidity during the
morning lectures and for his brilliance in the afternoon. By collateral
reading and by borrowing the notebook of his fellow students he managed
to scrape through the detestable morning courses, while his afternoon
courses were triumphs. In football he proved a giant and a terror, and,
in almost every form of track athletics, save for strange Berserker
rages that were sometimes displayed, he could be depended upon to win.
But his fellows were afraid to box with him, and he signalized his last
wrestling bout by sinking his teeth into the shoulder of his opponent.

After college, his father, in despair, sent him among the cow-punchers
of a Wyoming ranch. Three months later the doughty cowmen confessed he
was too much for them and telegraphed his father to come and take the
wild man away. Also, when the father arrived to take him away, the
cowmen allowed that they would vastly prefer chumming with howling
cannibals, gibbering lunatics, cavorting gorillas, grizzly bears, and
man-eating tigers than with this particular young college product with
hair parted in the middle.

There was one exception to the lack of memory of the life of his early
self, and that was language. By some quirk of atavism, a certain portion
of that early self's language had come down to him as a racial memory.
In moments of happiness, exaltation, or battle, he was prone to burst
out in wild barbaric songs or chants. It was by this means that he
located in time and space that strayed half of him who should have been
dead and dust for thousands of years. He sang, once, and deliberately,
several of the ancient chants in the presence of Professor Wertz, who
gave courses in old Saxon and who was a philologist of repute and
passion. At the first one, the professor pricked up his ears and
demanded to know what mongrel tongue or hog-German it was. When the
second chant was rendered, the professor was highly excited. James Ward
then concluded the performance by giving a song that always irresistibly
rushed to his lips when he was engaged in fierce struggling or fighting.
Then it was that Professor Wertz proclaimed it no hog-German, but early
German, or early Teuton, of a date that must far precede anything that
had ever been discovered and handed down by the scholars. So early was
it that it was beyond him; yet it was filled with haunting reminiscences
of word-forms he knew and which his trained intuition told him were true
and real. He demanded the source of the songs, and asked to borrow the
previous book that contained them. Also, he demanded to know why young
Ward had always posed as being profoundly ignorant of the German
language. And Ward could neither explain his ignorance nor lend the
book. Whereupon, after pleadings and entreaties that extended through
weeks, Professor Wertz took a dislike to the young man, believed him a
liar, and classified him as a man of monstrous selfishness for not
giving him a glimpse of this wonderful screed that was older than the
oldest any philologist had ever known or dreamed.

But little good did it do this much-mixed young man to know that half of
him was late American and the other half early Teuton. Nevertheless, the
late American in him was no weakling, and he (if he were a he and had a
shred of existence outside of these two) compelled an adjustment or
compromise between his one self that was a night-prowling savage that
kept his other self sleepy of mornings, and that other self that was
cultured and refined and that wanted to be normal and love and prosecute
business like other people. The afternoons and early evenings he gave to
the one, the nights to the other; the forenoons and parts of the nights
were devoted to sleep for the twain. But in the mornings he slept in bed
like a civilized man. In the night time he slept like a wild animal, as
he had slept the night Dave Slotter stepped on him in the woods.

Persuading his father to advance the capital, he went into business, and
keen and successful business he made of it, devoting his afternoons
whole-souled to it, while his partner devoted the mornings. The early
evenings he spent socially, but, as the hour grew to nine or ten, an
irresistible restlessness overcame him and he disappeared from the
haunts of men until the next afternoon. Friends and acquaintances
thought that he spent much of his time in sport. And they were right,
though they never would have dreamed of the nature of the sport, even if
they had seen him running coyotes in night-chases over the hills of Mill
Valley. Neither were the schooner captains believed when they reported
seeing, on cold winter mornings, a man swimming in the tide-rips of
Raccoon Straits or in the swift currents between Goat Island and Angel
Island miles from shore.

In the bungalow at Mill Valley he lived alone, save for Lee Sing, the
Chinese cook and factotum, who knew much about the strangeness of his
master, who was paid well for saying nothing, and who never did say
anything. After the satisfaction of his nights, a morning's sleep, and a
breakfast of Lee Sing's, James Ward crossed the bay to San Francisco on
a midday ferryboat and went to the club and on to his office, as normal
and conventional a man of business as could be found in the city. But as
the evening lengthened, the night called to him. There came a quickening
of all his perceptions and a restlessness. His hearing was suddenly
acute; the myriad night-noises told him a luring and familiar story;
and, if alone, he would begin to pace up and down the narrow room like
any caged animal from the wild.

Once, he ventured to fall in love. He never permitted himself that
diversion again. He was afraid. And for many a day the young lady,
scared at least out of a portion of her young ladyhood, bore on her arms
and shoulders and wrists divers black-and-blue bruises--tokens of
caresses which he had bestowed in all fond gentleness but too late at
night. There was the mistake. Had he ventured love-making in the
afternoon, all would have been well, for it would have been as the quiet
gentleman that he would have made love--but at night it was the uncouth,
wife-stealing savage of the dark German forests. Out of his wisdom, he
decided that afternoon love-making could be prosecuted successfully; but
out of the same wisdom he was convinced that marriage would prove a
ghastly failure. He found it appalling to imagine being married and
encountering his wife after dark.

So he had eschewed all love-making, regulated his dual life, cleaned up
a million in business, fought shy of match-making mamas and bright- and
eager-eyed young ladies of various ages, met Lilian Gersdale and made it
a rigid observance never to see her later than eight o'clock in the
evening, ran of nights after his coyotes, and slept in forest lairs--and
through it all had kept his secret save for Lee Sing ... and now, Dave
Slotter. It was the latter's discovery of both his selves that
frightened him. In spite of the counter fright he had given the burglar,
the latter might talk. And even if he did not, sooner or later he would
be found out by some one else.

Thus it was that James Ward made a fresh and heroic effort to control
the Teutonic barbarian that was half of him. So well did he make it a
point to see Lilian in the afternoons and early evenings, that the time
came when she accepted him for better or worse, and when he prayed
privily and fervently that it was not for worse. During this period no
prize-fighter ever trained more harshly and faithfully for a contest
than he trained to subdue the wild savage in him. Among other things, he
strove to exhaust himself during the day, so that sleep would render him
deaf to the call of the night. He took a vacation from the office and
went on long hunting trips, following the deer through the most
inaccessible and rugged country he could find--and always in the
daytime. Night found him indoors and tired. At home he installed a score
of exercise machines, and where other men might go through a particular
movement ten times, he went hundreds. Also, as a compromise, he built a
sleeping porch on the second story. Here he at least breathed the
blessed night air. Double screens prevented him from escaping into the
woods, and each night Lee Sing locked him in and each morning let him
out.

The time came, in the month of August, when he engaged additional
servants to assist Lee Sing and dared a house party in his Mill Valley
bungalow. Lilian, her mother and brother, and half a dozen mutual
friends, were the guests. For two days and nights all went well. And on
the third night, playing bridge till eleven o'clock, he had reason to be
proud of himself. His restlessness he successfully hid, but as luck
would have it, Lilian Gersdale was his opponent on his right. She was a
frail delicate flower of a woman, and in his night-mood her very frailty
incensed him. Not that he loved her less, but that he felt almost
irresistibly impelled to reach out and paw and maul her. Especially was
this true when she was engaged in playing a winning hand against him.

He had one of the deer-hounds brought in, and, when it seemed he must
fly to pieces with the tension, a caressing hand laid on the animal
brought him relief. These contacts with the hairy coat gave him instant
easement and enabled him to play out the evening. Nor did any one guess
the terrible struggle their host was making, the while he laughed so
carelessly and played so keenly and deliberately.

When they separated for the night, he saw to it that he parted from
Lilian in the presence of the others. Once on his sleeping porch, and
safely locked in, he doubled and tripled and even quadrupled his
exercises until, exhausted, he lay down on the couch to woo sleep and to
ponder two problems that especially troubled him. One was this matter
of exercise. It was a paradox. The more he exercised in this excessive
fashion, the stronger he became. While it was true that he thus quite
tired out his night-running Teutonic self, it seemed that he was merely
setting back the fatal day when his strength would be too much for him
and overpower him, and then it would be a strength more terrible than he
had yet known. The other problem was that of his marriage and of the
stratagems he must employ in order to avoid his wife after dark. And
thus fruitlessly pondering he fell asleep.

Now, where the huge grizzly bear came from that night was long a
mystery, while the people of the Springs Brothers' Circus, showing at
Sausalito, searched long and vainly for "Big Ben, the Biggest Grizzly in
Captivity." But Big Ben escaped, and, out of the mazes of half a
thousand bungalows and country estates, selected the grounds of James J.
Ward for visitation. The first Mr. Ward knew was when he found himself
on his feet, quivering and tense, a surge of battle in his breast and on
his lips the old war-chant. From without came a wild baying and
bellowing of the hounds. And sharp as a knife-thrust through the
pandemonium came the agony of a stricken dog--his dog, he knew.

Not stopping for slippers, pajama-clad, he burst through the door Lee
Sing had so carefully locked, and sped down the stairs and out into the
night. As his naked feet struck the graveled driveway, he stopped
abruptly, reached under the steps to a hiding-place he knew well, and
pulled forth a huge knotty club--his old companion on many a mad night
adventure on the hills. The frantic hullabaloo of the dogs was coming
nearer, and, swinging the club, he sprang straight into the thickets to
meet it.

The aroused household assembled on the wide veranda. Somebody turned on
the electric lights, but they could see nothing but one another's
frightened faces. Beyond the brightly illuminated driveway the trees
formed a wall of impenetrable blackness. Yet somewhere in that blackness
a terrible struggle was going on. There was an infernal outcry of
animals, a great snarling and growling, the sound of blows being struck,
and a smashing and crashing of underbrush by heavy bodies.

The tide of battle swept out from among the trees and upon the driveway
just beneath the onlookers. Then they saw. Mrs. Gersdale cried out and
clung fainting to her son. Lilian, clutching the railing so
spasmodically that a bruising hurt was left in her finger-ends for days,
gazed horror-stricken at a yellow-haired, wild-eyed giant whom she
recognized as the man who was to be her husband. He was swinging a great
club, and fighting furiously and calmly with a shaggy monster that was
bigger than any bear she had ever seen. One rip of the beast's claws had
dragged away Ward's pajama-coat and streaked his flesh with blood.

While most of Lilian Gersdale's fright was for the man beloved, there
was a large portion of it due to the man himself. Never had she dreamed
so formidable and magnificent a savage lurked under the starched shirt
and conventional garb of her betrothed. And never had she had any
conception of how a man battled. Such a battle was certainly not modern;
nor was she there beholding a modern man, though she did not know it.
For this was not Mr. James J. Ward, the San Francisco business man, but
one unnamed and unknown, a crude, rude savage creature who, by some
freak of chance, lived again after thrice a thousand years.

The hounds, ever maintaining their mad uproar, circled about the fight,
or dashed in and out, distracting the bear. When the animal turned to
meet such flanking assaults, the man leaped in and the club came down.
Angered afresh by every such blow, the bear would rush, and the man,
leaping and skipping, avoiding the dogs, went backwards or circled to
one side or the other. Whereupon the dogs, taking advantage of the
opening, would again spring in and draw the animal's wrath to them.

The end came suddenly. Whirling, the grizzly caught a hound with a wide
sweeping cuff that sent the brute, its ribs caved in and its back
broken, hurtling twenty feet. Then the human brute went mad. A foaming
rage flecked the lips that parted with a wild inarticulate cry, as it
sprang in, swung the club mightily in both hands, and brought it down
full on the head of the uprearing grizzly. Not even the skull of a
grizzly could withstand the crushing force of such a blow, and the
animal went down to meet the worrying of the hounds. And through their
scurrying leaped the man, squarely upon the body, where, in the white
electric light, resting on his club, he chanted a triumph in an unknown
tongue--a song so ancient that Professor Wertz would have given ten
years of his life for it.

His guests rushed to possess him and acclaim him, but James Ward,
suddenly looking out of the eyes of the early Teuton, saw the fair frail
Twentieth Century girl he loved, and felt something snap in his brain.
He staggered weakly toward her, dropped the club, and nearly fell.
Something had gone wrong with him. Inside his brain was an intolerable
agony. It seemed as if the soul of him were flying asunder. Following
the excited gaze of the others, he glanced back and saw the carcass of
the bear. The sight filled him with fear. He uttered a cry and would
have fled, had they not restrained him and led him into the bungalow.

       *       *       *       *       *

James J. Ward is still at the head of the firm of Ward, Knowles & Co.
But he no longer lives in the country; nor does he run of nights after
the coyotes under the moon. The early Teuton in him died the night of
the Mill Valley fight with the bear. James J. Ward is now wholly James
J. Ward, and he shares no part of his being with any vagabond
anachronism from the younger world. And so wholly is James J. Ward
modern, that he knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized
fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest is to him a
thing of abysmal terror. His city house is of the spick and span order,
and he evinces a great interest in burglar-proof devices. His home is a
tangle of electric wires, and after bed-time a guest can scarcely
breathe without setting off an alarm. Also, he has invented a
combination keyless door-lock that travelers may carry in their vest
pockets and apply immediately and successfully under all circumstances.
But his wife does not deem him a coward. She knows better. And, like any
hero, he is content to rest on his laurels. His bravery is never
questioned by those of his friends who are aware of the Mill Valley
episode.




THE RETURN[2]

BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

[Footnote 2: From _Pan's Garden_, by Algernon Blackwood--Permission of
the Macmillan Company.]


It was curious--that sense of dull uneasiness that came over him so
suddenly, so stealthily at first he scarcely noticed it, but with such
marked increase after a time that he presently got up and left the
theater. His seat was on the gangway of the dress circle, and he slipped
out awkwardly in the middle of what seemed to be the best and jolliest
song of the piece. The full house was shaking with laughter; so
infectious was the gaiety that even strangers turned to one another as
much as to say, "Now, isn't that funny?"

It was curious, too, the way the feeling first got into him at all, and
in the full swing of laughter, music, light-heartedness; for it came as
a vague suggestion, "I've forgotten something--something I meant to
do--something of importance. What in the world was it, now?" And he
thought hard, searching vainly through his mind; then dismissed it as
the dancing caught his attention. It came back a little later again,
during a passage of long-winded talk that bored him and set his
attention free once more, but came more strongly this time, insisting on
an answer. What could it have been that he had overlooked, left undone,
omitted to see to? It went on nibbling at the subconscious part of him.
Several times this happened, this dismissal and return, till at last the
thing declared itself more plainly--and he felt bothered, troubled,
distinctly uneasy.

He was wanted somewhere. There was somewhere else he ought to be. That
describes it best, perhaps. Some engagement of moment had entirely
slipped his memory--an engagement that involved another person, too. But
where, what, with whom? And, at length, this vague uneasiness amounted
to positive discomfort, so that he felt unable to enjoy the piece, and
left abruptly. Like a man to whom comes suddenly the horrible idea that
the match he lit his cigarette with and flung into the waste-paper
basket on leaving was not really out--a sort of panic distress--he
jumped into a taxicab and hurried to his flat to find everything in
order, of course; no smoke, no fire, no smell of burning.

But his evening was spoiled. He sat smoking in his armchair at home,
this business man of forty, practical in mind, of character some called
stolid, cursing himself for an imaginative fool. It was now too late to
go back to the theater; the club bored him; he spent an hour with the
evening papers, dipping into books, sipping a long cool drink, doing
odds and ends about the flat. "I'll go to bed early for a change," he
laughed, but really all the time fighting--yes, deliberately
fighting--this strange attack of uneasiness that so insidiously grew
upwards, outwards from the buried depths of him that sought so
strenuously to deny it. It never occurred to him that he was ill. He was
not ill. His health was thunderingly good. He was as robust as a
coal-heaver.

The flat was roomy, high up on the top floor, yet in a busy part of
town, so that the roar of traffic mounted round it like a sea. Through
the open windows came the fresh night air of June. He had never noticed
before how sweet the London night air could be, and that not all the
smoke and dust could smother a certain touch of wild fragrance that
tinctured it with perfume--yes, almost perfume--as of the country. He
swallowed a draught of it as he stood there, staring out across the
tangled world of roofs and chimney-pots. He saw the procession of the
clouds; he saw the stars; he saw the moonlight falling in a shower of
silver spears upon the slates and wires and steeples. And something in
him quickened--something that had never stirred before.

He turned with a horrid start, for the uneasiness had of a sudden leaped
within him like an animal. There was some one in the flat.

Instantly, with action--even this slight action--the fancy vanished;
but, all the same, he switched on the electric lights and made a search.
For it seemed to him that some one had crept up close behind him while
he stood there watching the night--some one, whose silent presence
fingered with unerring touch both this new thing that had quickened in
his heart and that sense of original deep uneasiness. He was amazed at
himself--angry--indignant that he could be thus foolishly upset over
nothing, yet at the same time profoundly distressed at this vehement
growth of a new thing in his well-ordered personality. Growth? He
dismissed the word the moment it occurred to him--but it had occurred to
him. It stayed. While he searched the empty flat, the long passages, the
gloomy bedroom at the end, the little hall where he kept his overcoats
and golf sticks, it stayed. Growth! It was oddly disquieting. Growth
to him involved, though he neither acknowledged nor recognized the truth
perhaps, some kind of undesirable changeableness, instability,
unbalance.

Yet singular as it all was, he realized that the uneasiness and the
sudden appreciation of beauty that was so new to him had both entered by
the same door into his being. When he came back to the front room he
noticed that he was perspiring. There were little drops of moisture on
his forehead. And down his spine ran chills, little, faint quivers of
cold. He was shivering.

He lit his big meerschaum pipe, and left the lights all burning. The
feeling that there was something he had overlooked, forgotten, left
undone, had vanished. Whatever the original cause of this absurd
uneasiness might be--he called it absurd on purpose because he now
realized in the depths of him that it was really more vital than he
cared about--it was much nearer to discovery than before. It dodged
about just below the threshold of discovery. It was as close as that.
Any moment he would know what it was; he would remember. Yes, he would
_remember_. Meanwhile, he was in the right place. No desire to go
elsewhere afflicted him, as in the theater. Here was the place, here in
the flat.

And then it was with a kind of sudden burst and rush--it seemed to him
the only way to phrase it--memory gave up her dead.

At first he only caught her peeping round the corner at him, drawing
aside a corner of an enormous curtain, as it were; striving for more
complete entrance as though the mass of it were difficult to move. But
he understood, he knew, he recognized. It was enough for that. As an
entrance into his being--heart, mind, soul--was being attempted and the
entrance because of his stolid temperament was difficult of
accomplishment, there was effort, strain. Something in him had first to
be opened up, widened, made soft and ready as by an operation, before
full entrance could be effected. This much he grasped though for the
life of him he could not have put it into words. Also he knew who it was
that sought an entrance. Deliberately from himself he withheld the name.
But he knew as surely as though Straughan stood in the room and faced
him with a knife saying, "Let me in, let me in. I wish you to know I'm
here. I'm clearing a way! You recall our promise?"

He rose from his chair and went to the open window again, the strange
fear slowly passing. The cool air fanned his cheeks. Beauty till now had
scarcely ever brushed the surface of his soul. He had never troubled his
head about it. It passed him by indifferent; and he had ever loathed the
mouthy prating of it on others' lips. He was practical; beauty was for
dreamers, for women, for men who had means and leisure. He had not
exactly scorned it; rather it had never touched his life, to sweeten, to
cheer, to uplift. Artists for him were like monks--another sex
almost--useless beings who never helped the world go round. He was for
action always, work, activity, achievement as he saw them. He remembered
Straughan vaguely--Straughan, the ever impecunious friend of his youth,
always talking of color and sound--mysterious, ineffectual things. He
even forgot what they had quarreled about, if they had quarreled at all
even; or why they had gone apart all these years ago. And certainly he
had forgotten any promise. Memory as yet only peeped at him round the
corner of that huge curtain tentatively, suggestively, yet--he was
obliged to admit it--somewhat winningly. He was conscious of this
gentle, sweet seductiveness that now replaced his fear.

And as he stood now at the open window peering over huge London, beauty
came close and smote him between the eyes. She came blindingly, with her
train of stars and clouds and perfumes. Night, mysterious, myriad-eyed,
and flaming across her sea of haunted shadows invaded his heart and
shook him with her immemorial wonder and delight. He found no words of
course to clothe the new unwonted sensations. He only knew that all his
former dread, uneasiness, distress, and with them this idea of growth
that had seemed so repugnant to him were merged, swept up, and gathered
magnificently home into a wave of beauty that enveloped him. "See it,
and understand," ran a secret inner whisper across his mind. He saw. He
understood....

He went back and turned the lights out. Then he took his place again at
that open window, drinking in the night. He saw a new world; a species
of intoxication held him. He sighed, as his thoughts blundered for
expression among words and sentences that knew him not. But the delight
was there, the wonder, the mystery. He watched with heart alternately
tightening and expanding the transfiguring play of moon and shadow over
the sea of buildings. He saw the dance of the hurrying clouds, the open
patches into outer space, the veiling and unveiling of that ancient
silvery face; and he caught strange whispers of the hierophantic,
sacerdotal power that has echoed down the world since Time began and
dropped strange magic phrases into every poet's heart, since first "God
dawned on Chaos"--the Beauty of the Night.

A long time passed--it may have been one hour, it may have been
three--when at length he turned away and went slowly to his bedroom. A
deep peace lay over him. Something quite new and blessed had crept into
his life and thought. He could not quite understand it all. He only knew
that it uplifted. There was no longer the least sign of affliction or
distress. Even the inevitable reaction that set in could not destroy
that.

And then as he lay in bed nearing the borderland of sleep, suddenly and
without any obvious suggestion to bring it, he remembered another thing.
He remembered the promise. Memory got past the big curtain for an
instant and showed her face. She looked into his eyes. It must have been
a dozen years ago when Straughan and he had made that foolish solemn
promise, that whoever died first should show himself if possible to the
other.

He had utterly forgotten it--till now. But Straughan had not forgotten
it. The letter came three weeks later from India. That very evening
Straughan had died--at nine o'clock. And he had come back--in the Beauty
that he loved.




THE SECOND GENERATION[3]

BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

[Footnote 3: _From Ten-Minute Stories_, published by E. P. Dutton & Co.]


Sometimes, in a moment of sharp experience, comes that vivid flash of
insight that makes a platitude suddenly seem a revelation--its full
content is abruptly realized. "Ten years _is_ a long time, yes," he
thought, as he walked up the drive to the great Kensington house where
she still lived.

Ten years--long enough, at any rate, for her to have married and for her
husband to have died. More than that he had not heard, in the outlandish
places where life had cast him in the interval. He wondered whether
there had been any children. All manner of thoughts and questions,
confused a little, passed across his mind. He was well-to-do now, though
probably his entire capital did not amount to her income for a single
year. He glanced at the huge, forbidding mansion. Yet that pride was
false which had made of poverty an insuperable obstacle. He saw it now.
He had learned values in his long exile.

But he was still ridiculously timid. This confusion of thought, of
mental images rather, was due to a kind of fear, since worship ever is
akin to awe. He was as nervous as a boy going up for a _viva voce_; and
with the excitement was also that unconquerable sinking--that horrid
shrinking sensation that excessive shyness brings. Why in the world had
he come? Why had he telegraphed the very day after his arrival in
England? Why had he not sent a tentative, tactful letter, feeling his
way a little?

Very slowly he walked up the drive, feeling that if a reasonable chance
of escape presented itself he would almost take it. But all the windows
stared so hard at him that retreat was really impossible now and though
no faces were visible behind the curtains, all had seen him, possibly
she herself--his heart beat absurdly at the extravagant suggestion. Yet
it was odd--he felt so certain of being seen, and that someone watched
him. He reached the wide stone steps that were clean as marble, and
shrank from the mark his boots must make upon their spotlessness. In
desperation, then, before he could change his mind, he touched the bell.
But he did not hear it ring--mercifully; that irrevocable sound must
have paralyzed him altogether. If no one came to answer, he might still
leave a card in the letter-box and slip away. Oh, how utterly he
despised himself for such a thought! A man of thirty with such a chicken
heart was not fit to protect a child, much less a woman. And he recalled
with a little stab of pain that the man she married had been noted for
his courage, his determined action, his inflexible firmness in various
public situations, head and shoulders above lesser men. What presumption
on his own part ever to dream!... He remembered, too, with no apparent
reason in particular, that this man had a grown-up son already, by a
former marriage.

And still no one came to open that huge, contemptuous door with its so
menacing, so hostile air. His back was to it, as he carelessly twirled
his umbrella, but he felt its sneering expression behind him while it
looked him up and down. It seemed to push him away. The entire mansion
focused its message through that stern portal: Little timid men are not
welcomed here.

How well he remembered the house! How often in years gone by had he not
stood and waited just like this, trembling with delight and
anticipation, yet terrified lest the bell should be answered and the
great door actually swung wide! Then, as now, he would have run, had he
dared. He was still afraid--his worship was so deep. But in all these
years of exile in wild places, farming, mining, working for the position
he had at last attained, her face and the memory of her gracious
presence had been his comfort and support, his only consolation, though
never his actual joy. There was so little foundation for it all, yet her
smile and the words she had spoken to him from time to time in friendly
conversation had clung, inspired, kept him going--for he knew them all
by heart. And more than once in foolish optimistic moods, he had
imagined, greatly daring, that she possibly had meant more....

He touched the bell a second time--with the point of his umbrella. He
meant to go in, carelessly as it were, saying as lightly as might be,
"Oh, I'm back in England again--if you haven't _quite_ forgotten my
existence--I could not forego the pleasure of saying 'How-do-you-do?'
and hearing that you are well ...," and the rest; then presently bow
himself easily out--into the old loneliness again. But he would at least
have seen her; he would have heard her voice, and looked into her
gentle, amber eyes; he would have touched her hand. She might even ask
him to come in another day and see her! He had rehearsed it all a
hundred times, as certain feeble temperaments do rehearse such scenes.
And he came rather well out of that rehearsal, though always with an
aching heart, the old great yearnings unfulfilled. All the way across
the Atlantic he had thought about it, though with lessening confidence
as the time drew near. The very night of his arrival in London he wrote,
then, tearing up the letter (after sleeping over it), he had telegraphed
next morning, asking if she would be in. He signed his surname--such a
very common name, alas! but surely she would know--and her reply,
"Please call 4:30," struck him as rather oddly worded. Yet here he was.

There was a rattle of the big door knob, that aggressive, hostile knob
that thrust out at him insolently like a fist of bronze. He started,
angry with himself for doing so. But the door did not open. He became
suddenly conscious of the wilds he had lived in for so long; his clothes
were hardly fashionable; his voice probably had a twang in it, and he
used tricks of speech that must betray the rough life so recently left.
What would she think of him, now? He looked much older, too. And how
brusque it was to have telegraphed like that! He felt awkward, gauche,
tongue-tied, hot and cold by turns. The sentences, so carefully
rehearsed, fled beyond recovery.

Good heavens--the door was open! It had been open for some minutes. It
moved noiselessly on big hinges. He acted automatically; he heard
himself asking if her ladyship was at home, though his voice was nearly
inaudible. The next moment he was standing in the great, dim hall, so
poignantly familiar, and the remembered perfume almost made him sway. He
did not hear the door close, but he knew. He was caught. The butler
betrayed an instant's surprise--or was it over-wrought imagination
again?--when he gave his name. It seemed to him--though only later did
he grasp the significance of that curious intuition--that the man had
expected another caller instead. The man took his card respectfully and
disappeared. These flunkeys were so marvellously trained. He was too
long accustomed to straight question and straight answer, but here, in
the Old Country, privacy was jealously guarded with such careful ritual.

And almost immediately the butler returned, still expressionless, and
showed him into the large drawing-room on the ground floor that he knew
so well. Tea was on the table--tea for one. He felt puzzled. "If you
will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will see you afterwards," was
what he heard. And though his breath came thickly, he asked the question
that forced itself out. Before he knew what he was saying he asked it,
"Is she ill?" "Oh, no, her ladyship is quite well, thank you, sir. If
you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will see you afterwards." The
horrid formula was repeated, word for word. He sank into an armchair and
mechanically poured out his own tea. What he felt he did not exactly
know. It seemed so unusual, so utterly unexpected, so unnecessary, too.
Was it a special attention, or was it merely casual? That it could mean
anything else did not occur to him. How was she busy, occupied--not
here to give him tea? He could not understand it. It seemed such a farce
having tea alone like this--it was like waiting for an audience, it was
like a doctor's or a dentist's room. He felt bewildered, ill at ease,
cheap.... But after ten years in primitive lands perhaps London usages
had changed in some extraordinary manner. He recalled his first
amazement at the motor-omnibuses, taxicabs, and electric tubes. All were
new. London was otherwise than when he left it. Piccadilly and the
Marble Arch themselves had altered. And, with his reflection, a shade
more confidence stole in. She knew that he was there and presently she
would come in and speak with him, explaining everything by the mere fact
of her delicious presence. He was ready for the ordeal, he would see
her--and drop out again. It was worth all manner of pain, even of
mortification. He was in her house, drinking her tea, sitting in a chair
she used herself perhaps. Only he would never dare to say a word or make
a sign that might betray his changeless secret. He still felt the boyish
worshipper, worshipping in dumbness from a distance, one of a group of
many others like himself. Their dreams had faded, his had continued,
that was the difference. Memories tore and raced and poured upon him.
How sweet and gentle she had always been to him! He used to wonder
sometimes.... Once, he remembered, he had rehearsed a declaration, but
while rehearsing the big man had come in and captured her, though he had
only read the definite news long after by chance in an Arizona paper.

He gulped his tea down. His heart alternately leaped and stood still. A
sort of numbness held him most of that dreadful interval, and no clear
thought came at all. Every ten seconds his head turned towards the door
that rattled, seemed to move, yet never opened. But any moment now it
_must_ open, and he would be in her very presence, breathing the same
air with her. He would see her, charge himself with her beauty once more
to the brim, and then go out again into the wilderness--the wilderness
of life--without her, and not for a mere ten years but for always. She
was so utterly beyond his reach. He felt like a backwoodsman, he was a
backwoodsman.

For one thing only was he duly prepared, though he thought about it
little enough--she would, of course, have changed. The photograph he
owned, cut from an illustrated paper, was not true now. It might even be
a little shock perhaps. He must remember that. Ten years cannot pass
over a woman without--

Before he knew it the door was open, and she was advancing quietly
towards him across the thick carpet that deadened sound. With both hands
outstretched she came, and with the sweetest welcoming smile upon her
parted lips he had seen in any human face. Her eyes were soft with joy.
His whole heart leaped within him; for the instant he saw her it all
flashed clear as sunlight--that she knew and understood. She had always
known, had always understood. Speech came easily to him in a flood, had
he needed it, but he did not need it. It was all so adorably easy,
simple, natural, and true. He just took her hands--those welcoming,
outstretched hands--in both of his own, and led her to the nearest sofa.
He was not even surprised at himself. Inevitably, out of depths of
truth, this meeting came about. And he uttered a little foolish
commonplace, because he feared the huge revulsion that his sudden glory
brought, and loved to taste it slowly:

"So you live here still?"

"Here, and here," she answered softly, touching his heart, and then her
own. "I am attached to this house, too, because _you_ used to come and
see me here, and because it was here I waited so long for you, and still
wait. I shall never leave it--unless you change. You see, we live
together here."

He said nothing. He leaned forward to take and hold her. The abrupt
knowledge of it all somehow did not seem abrupt--it was as though he had
known it always; and the complete disclosure did not seem disclosure
either--rather as though she told him something he had inexplicably left
unrealized, yet not forgotten. He felt absolutely master of himself,
yet, in a curious sense, outside of himself at the same time. His arms
were already open--when she gently held her hands up to prevent. He
heard a faint sound outside the door.

"But you are free," he cried, his great passion breaking out and
flooding him, yet most oddly well controlled, "and I--"

She interrupted him in the softest, quietest whisper he had ever heard:

"You are not free, as I am free--not yet."

The sound outside came suddenly closer. It was a step. There was a faint
click on the handle of the door. In a flash, then, came the dreadful
shock that overwhelmed him--the abrupt realization of the truth that was
somehow horrible--that Time, all these years, had left no mark upon her
and that _she had not changed_. Her face was as young as when he saw her
last.

With it there came cold and darkness into the great room. He shivered
with cold, but an alien, unaccountable cold. Some great shadow dropped
upon the entire earth, and though but a second could have passed before
the handle actually turned, and the other person entered, it seemed to
him like several minutes. He heard her saying this amazing thing that
was question, answer, and forgiveness all in one--this, at least, he
divined before the ghastly interruption came--"But, George--if you had
only spoken--!"

With ice in his blood he heard the butler saying that her ladyship would
be "pleased" to see him if he had finished his tea and would be "so good
as to bring the papers and documents upstairs with him." He had just
sufficient control of certain muscles to stand upright and murmur that
he would come. He rose from a sofa that held no one but himself. All at
once he staggered. He really did not know exactly what happened, or how
he managed to stammer out the medley of excuses and semi-explanations
that battered their way through his brain and issued somehow in definite
words from his lips. Somehow or other he accomplished it. The sudden
attack, the faintness, the collapse!... He vaguely remembered
afterwards--with amazement too--the suavity of the butler as he
suggested telephoning for a doctor, and that he just managed to forbid
it, refusing the offered glass of brandy as well, remembered contriving
to stumble into the taxicab and give his hotel address with a final
explanation that he would call another day and "bring the papers." It
was quite clear that his telegram had been attributed to someone else,
someone "with papers"--perhaps a solicitor or architect. His name was
such an ordinary one, there were so many Smiths. It was also clear that
she whom he had come to see and _had_ seen, no longer lived here in the
flesh....

And just as he left the hall he had the vision--mere fleeting glimpse it
was--of a tall, slim, girlish figure on the stairs asking if anything
was wrong, and realized vaguely through his atrocious pain that she was,
of course, the wife of the son who had inherited....




JOSEPH: A STORY

BY KATHERINE RICKFORD


They were sitting round the fire after dinner--not an ordinary fire--one
of those fires that has a little room all to itself with seats at each
side of it to hold a couple of people or three.

The big dining room was paneled with oak. At the far end was a handsome
dresser that dated back for generations. One's imagination ran riot when
one pictured the people who must have laid those pewter plates on the
long, narrow, solid table. Massive medieval chests stood against the
walls. Arms and parts of armor hung against the panelling; but one
noticed few of these things, for there was no light in the room save
what the fire gave.

It was Christmas Eve. Games had been played. The old had vied with the
young at snatching raisins from the burning snapdragon. The children had
long since gone to bed; it was time their elders followed them, but they
lingered round the fire, taking turns at telling stories. Nothing very
weird had been told; no one had felt any wish to peep over his shoulder
or try to penetrate the darkness of the far end of the room; the
omission caused a sensation of something wanting. From each one there
this thought went out, and so a sudden silence fell upon the party. It
was a girl who broke it--a mere child; she wore her hair up that night
for the first time, and that seemed to give her the right to sit up so
late.

"Mr. Grady is going to tell one," she said.

All eyes were turned to a middle-aged man in a deep armchair placed
straight in front of the fire. He was short, inclined to be fat, with a
bald head and a pointed beard like the beards that sailors wear. It was
plain that he was deeply conscious of the sudden turning of so much
strained yet forceful thought upon himself. He was restless in his chair
as people are in a room that is overheated. He blinked his eyes as he
looked round the company. His lips twitched in a nervous manner. One
side of him seemed to be endeavoring to restrain another side of him
from a feverish desire to speak.

"It was this room that made me think of him," he said thoughtfully.

There was a long silence, but it occurred to no one to prompt him. Every
one seemed to understand that he was going to speak, or rather that
something inside him was going to speak, some force that craved
expression and was using him as a medium.

The little old man's pink face grew strangely calm, the animation that
usually lit it was gone. One would have said that the girl who had
started him already regretted the impulse, and now wanted to stop him.
She was breathing heavily, and once or twice made as though she would
speak to him, but no words came. She must have abandoned the idea, for
she fell to studying the company. She examined them carefully, one by
one. "This one," she told herself, "is so-and-so, and that one there
just another so-and-so." She stared at them, knowing that she could not
turn them to herself with her stare. They were just bodies kept working,
so to speak, by some subtle sort of sentry left behind by the real
selves that streamed out in pent-up thought to the little old man in the
chair in front of the fire.

"His name was Joseph; at least they called him Joseph. He dreamed, you
understand--dreams. He was an extraordinary lad in many ways. His
mother--I knew her very well--had three children in quick succession,
soon after marriage; then ten years went by and Joseph was born. Quiet
and reserved he always was, a self-contained child whose only friend was
his mother. People said things about him, you know how people talk. Some
said he was not Clara's child at all, but that she had adopted him;
others, that her husband was not his father, and these put her change of
manner down to a perpetual struggle to keep her husband comfortably in
the dark. I always imagined that the boy was in some way aware of all
this gossip, for I noticed that he took a dislike to the people who
spread it most."

The little man rested his elbows on the arms of his chair and let the
tips of his fingers meet in front of him. A smile played about his
mouth. He seemed to be searching among his reminiscences for the one
that would give the clearest portrait of Joseph.

"Well, anyway," he said at last, "the boy was odd, there is no
gainsaying the fact. I suppose he was eleven when Clara came down here
with her family for Christmas. The Coningtons owned the place then--Mrs.
Conington was Clara's sister. It was Christmas Eve, as it is now, many
years ago. We had spent a normal Christmas Eve; a little happier,
perhaps, than usual by reason of the family re-union and because of the
presence of so many children. We had eaten and drank, laughed and played
and gone to bed.

"I woke in the middle of the night from sheer restlessness. Clara,
knowing my weakness, had given me a fire in my room. I lit a cigarette,
played with a book, and then, purely from curiosity, opened the door and
looked down the passage. From my door I could see the head of the
staircase in the distance; the opposite wing of the house, or the
passage rather beyond the stairs, was in darkness. The reason I saw the
staircase at all was that the window you pass coming downstairs allowed
the moon to throw an uncertain light upon it, a weird light because of
the stained glass. I was arrested by the curious effect of this patch of
light in so much darkness when suddenly someone came into it, turned,
and went downstairs. It was just like a scene in a theater; something
was about to happen that I was going to miss. I ran as I was,
barefooted, to the head of the stairs and looked over the banister. I
was excited, strung up, too strung up to feel the fright that I knew
must be with me. I remember the sensation perfectly. I knew that I was
afraid, yet I did not feel fright.

"On the stairs nothing moved. The little hall down here was lost in
darkness. Looking over the banister I was facing the stained glass
window. You know how the stairs run around three sides of the hall;
well, it occurred to me that if I went halfway down and stood under the
window I should be able to keep the top of the stairs in sight and see
anything that might happen in the hall. I crept down very cautiously and
waited under the window. First of all, I saw the suit of empty armor
just outside the door here. You know how a thing like that, if you stare
at it in a poor light, appears to move; well, it moved sure enough, and
the illusion was enhanced by clouds being blown across the moon. By the
fire like this one can talk of these things rationally, but in the dead
of night it is a different matter, so I went down a few steps to make
sure of that armor, when suddenly something passed me on the stairs. I
did not hear it, I did not see it, I sensed it in no way, I just knew
that something had passed me on its way upstairs. I realized that my
retreat was cut off, and with the knowledge fear came upon me.

"I had seen someone come down the stairs; that, at any rate, was
definite; now I wanted to see him again. Any ghost is bad enough, but a
ghost that one can see is better than one that one can't. I managed to
get past the suit of armor, but then I had to feel my way to these
double doors here."

He indicated the direction of the doors by a curious wave of his hand.
He did not look toward them nor did any of the party. Both men and women
were completely absorbed in his story; they seemed to be mesmerized by
the earnestness of his manner. Only the girl was restless; she gave an
impression of impatience with the slowness with which he came to his
point. One would have said that she was apart from her fellows, an alien
among strangers.

"So dense was the darkness that I made sure of finding the first door
closed, but it was not, it was wide open, and, standing between them, I
could feel that the other was open, too. I was standing literally in the
wall of the house, and as I peered into the room, trying to make out
some familiar object, thoughts ran through my mind of people who had
been bricked up in walls and left there to die. For a moment I caught
the spirit of the inside of a thick wall. Then suddenly I felt the
sensation I have often read about but never experienced before: I knew
there was some one in the room. You are surprised, yes, but wait! I knew
more: I knew that some one was conscious of my presence. It occurred to
me that whoever it was might want to get out of the door. I made room
for him to pass. I waited for him, made sure of him, began to feel
giddy, and then a man's voice, deep and clear:

"'There is some one there; who is it?'

"I answered mechanically, 'George Grady.'

"'I'm Joseph.'

"A match was drawn across a matchbox, and I saw the boy bending over a
candle waiting for the wick to catch. For a moment I thought he must be
walking in his sleep, but he turned to me quite naturally and said in
his own boyish voice:

"'Lost anything?'

"I was amazed at the lad's complete calm. I wanted to share my fright
with some one, instead I had to hide it from this boy. I was conscious
of a curious sense of shame. I had watched him grow, taught him, praised
him, scolded him, and yet here he was waiting for an explanation of my
presence in the dining room at that odd hour of the night.

"Soon he repeated the question, 'Lost anything?'

"'No,' I said, and then I stammered, 'Have you?'

"'No,' he said with a little laugh. 'It's that room, I can't sleep in
it.'

"'Oh,' I said. 'What's the matter with the room?'

"'It's the room I was killed in,' he said quite simply.

"Of course I had heard about his dreams, but I had had no direct
experience of them; when, therefore, he said that he had been killed in
his room I took it for granted that he had been dreaming again. I was at
a loss to know quite how to tackle him; whether to treat the whole thing
as absurd and laugh it off as such, or whether to humor him and hear his
story. I got him upstairs to my room, sat him in a big armchair, and
poked the fire into a blaze.

"'You've been dreaming again,' I said bluntly.

"'Oh, no I haven't. Don't you run away with that idea.'

"His whole manner was so grown up that it was quite unthinkable to treat
him as the child he really was. In fact, it was a little uncanny, this
man in a child's frame.

"'I was killed there,' he said again.

"'How do you mean, killed?' I asked him.

"'Why, killed--murdered. Of course it was years and years ago, I can't
say when; still I remember the room. I suppose it was the room that
reminded me of the incident.'

"'Incident?' I exclaimed.

"'What else? Being killed is only an incident in the existence of any
one. One makes a fuss about it at the time, of course, but really when
you come to think of it....'

"'Tell me about it,' I said, lighting a cigarette. He lit one too, that
child, and began.

"'You know my room is the only modern one in this old house. Nobody
knows why it is modern. The reason is obvious. Of course it was made
modern after I was killed there. The funny thing is that I should have
been put there. I suppose it was done for a purpose, because I--I----'

"He looked at me so fixedly I knew he would catch me if I lied.

"'What?' I asked.

"'Dream.'

"'Yes,' I said, 'that is why you were put there.'

"'I thought so, and yet of all the rooms--but then, of course, no one
knew. Anyhow I did not recognize the room until after I was in bed. I
had been asleep some time and then I woke suddenly. There is an old
wheel-back chair there--the only old thing in the room. It is standing
facing the fire as it must have stood the night I was killed. The fire
was burning brightly, the pattern of the back of the chair was thrown in
shadow across the ceiling. Now the night I was murdered the conditions
were exactly the same, so directly I saw that pattern on the ceiling I
remembered the whole thing. I was not dreaming, don't think it, I was
not. What happened that night was this: I was lying in bed counting the
parts of the back of that chair in shadow on the ceiling. I probably
could not get to sleep, you know the sort of thing, count up to a
thousand and remember in the morning where you got to. Well, I was
counting those pieces when suddenly they were all obliterated, the whole
back became a shadow, some one was sitting in the chair. Now, surely,
you understand that directly I saw the shadow of that chair on the
ceiling to-night I realized that I had not a moment to lose. At any
moment that same person might come back to that same chair and escape
would be impossible. I slipped from my bed as quickly as I could and ran
downstairs.'

"'But were you not afraid,' I asked, 'downstairs?'

"'That she might follow me? It was a woman, you know. No, I don't think
I was. She does not belong downstairs. Anyhow she didn't.'

"'No,' I said. 'No.'

"My voice must have been out of control, for he caught me up at once.

"'You don't mean to say you saw her?' he said vehemently.

"'Oh, no.'

"'You felt her?'

"'She passed me as I came downstairs,' I said.

"'What can I have done to her that she follows me so?' He buried his
face in his hands as though searching for an answer to his thought.
Suddenly he looked up and stared at me.

"'Where had I got to? Oh yes, the murder. I can remember how startled I
was to see that shadow in the chair--startled, you know, but not really
frightened. I leaned up in bed and looked at the chair, and sure enough
a woman was sitting in it--a young woman. I watched her with a profound
interest until she began to turn in her chair, as I felt, to look at me;
when she did that I shrank back in bed. I dared not meet her eyes. She
might not have had eyes, she might not have had a face. You know the
sort of pictures that one sees when one glances back at all one's soul
has ever thought.

"'I got back in the bed as far as I could and peeped over the sheets at
the shadow on the ceiling. I was tired; frightened to death; I grew
weary of watching. I must have fallen asleep, for suddenly the fire was
almost out, the pattern of the chair barely discernible, the shadow had
gone. I raised myself with a sense of huge relief. Yes, the chair was
empty, but, just think of it, the woman was on the floor, on her hands
and knees, crawling toward the bed.

"'I fell back stricken with terror.

"'Very soon I felt a gentle pull at the counterpane. I thought I was in
a nightmare but too lazy or too comfortable to try to wake myself from
it. I waited in an agony of suspense, but nothing seemed to be
happening, in fact I had just persuaded myself that the movement of the
counterpane was fancy when a hand brushed softly over my knee. There was
no mistaking it, I could feel the long, thin fingers. Now was the time
to do something. I tried to rouse myself, but all my efforts were
futile, I was stiff from head to foot.

"'Although the hand was lost to me, outwardly, it now came within my
range of knowledge, if you know what I mean. I knew that it was groping
its way along the bed feeling for some other part of me. At any moment I
could have said exactly where it had got to. When it was hovering just
over my chest another hand knocked lightly against my shoulder. I
fancied it lost, and wandering in search of its fellow.

"'I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling when the hands met; the
weight of their presence brought a feeling of oppression to my chest. I
seemed to be completely cut off from my body; I had no sort of
connection with any part of it, nothing about me would respond to my
will to make it move.

"'There was no sound at all anywhere.

"'I fell into a state of indifference, a sort of patient indifference
that can wait for an appointed time to come. How long I waited I cannot
say, but when the time came it found me ready. I was not taken by
surprise.

"'There was a great upward rush of pent-up force released; it was like a
mighty mass of men who have been lost in prayer rising to their feet. I
can't remember clearly, but I think the woman must have got on to my
bed. I could not follow her distinctly, my whole attention was
concentrated on her hands. At the time I felt those fingers itching for
my throat.

"'At last they moved; slowly at first, then quicker; and then a
long-drawn swish like the sound of an over-bold wave that has broken too
far up the beach and is sweeping back to join the sea.'

"The boy was silent for a moment, then he stretched out his hand for the
cigarettes.

"'You remember nothing else?' I asked him.

"'No,' he said. 'The next thing I remember clearly is deliberately
breaking the nursery window because it was raining and mother would not
let me go out.'"

There was a moment's tension, then the strain of listening passed and
every one seemed to be speaking at once. The Rector was taking the story
seriously.

"Tell me, Grady," he said. "How long do you suppose elapsed between the
boy's murder and his breaking the nursery window?"

But a young married woman in the first flush of her happiness broke in
between them. She ridiculed the whole idea. Of course the boy was
dreaming. She was drawing the majority to her way of thinking when, from
the corner where the girl sat, a hollow-sounding voice:

"And the boy? Where is he?"

The tone of the girl's voice inspired horror, that fear that does not
know what it is it fears; one could see it on every face; on every face,
that is, but the face of the bald-headed little man; there was no horror
on his face; he was smiling serenely as he looked the girl straight in
the eyes.

"He's a man now," he said.

"Alive?" she cried.

"Why not?" said the little old man, rubbing his hands together.

She tried to rise, but her frock had got caught between the chairs and
pulled her to her seat again. The man next her put out his hand to
steady her, but she dashed it away roughly. She looked round the party
for an instant for all the world like an animal at bay, then she sprang
to her feet and charged blindly. They crowded round her to prevent her
falling; at the touch of their hands she stopped. She was out of breath
as though she had been running.

"All right," she said, pushing their hands from her. "All right. I'll
come quietly. I did it."

They caught her as she fell and laid her on the sofa watching the color
fade from her face.

The hostess, an old woman with white hair and a kind face, approached
the little old man; for once in her life she was roused to anger.

"I can't think how you could be so stupid," she said. "See what you have
done."

"I did it for a purpose," he said.

"For a purpose?"

"I have always thought that girl was the culprit. I have to thank you
for the opportunity you have given me of making sure."




THE CLAVECIN, BRUGES[4]

BY GEORGE WHARTON EDWARDS

[Footnote 4: By permission of The Century Co.]


A silent, grass-grown market-place, upon the uneven stones of which the
sabots of a passing peasant clatter loudly. A group of sleepy-looking
soldiers in red trousers lolling about the wide portal of the Belfry,
which rears aloft against the pearly sky

    All the height it has
    Of ancient stone.

As the chime ceases there lingers for a space a faint musical hum in the
air; the stones seem to carry and retain the melody; one is loath to
move for fear of losing some part of the harmony.

I feel an indescribable impulse to climb the four hundred odd steps;
incomprehensible, for I detest steeple-climbing, and have no patience
with steeple-climbers.

Before I realize it, I am at the stairs. "Hold, sir!" from behind me.
"It is forbidden." In wretched French a weazen-faced little soldier
explains that repairs are about to be made in the tower, in consequence
of which visitors are forbidden. A franc removes this military obstacle,
and I press on.

At the top of the stairs is an old Flemish woman shelling peas, while
over her shoulder peeps a tame magpie. A savory odor of stewing
vegetables fills the air.

"What do you wish, sir?" Many shrugs, gesticulations, and sighs of
objurgation, which are covered by a shining new five-franc piece, and
she produces a bunch of keys. As the door closes upon me the magpie
gives a hoarse, gleeful squawk.

... A huge, dim room with a vaulted ceiling. Against the wall lean
ancient stone statues, noseless and disfigured, crowned and sceptered
effigies of forgotten lords and ladies of Flanders. High up on the wall
two slitted Gothic windows, through which the violet light of day is
streaming. I hear the gentle coo of pigeons. To the right a low door,
some vanishing steps of stone, and a hanging hand-rope. Before I have
taken a dozen steps upward I am lost in the darkness; the steps are worn
hollow and sloping, the rope is slippery--seems to have been waxed, so
smooth has it become by handling. Four hundred steps and over; I have
lost track of the number, and stumble giddily upward round and round the
slender stone shaft. I am conscious of low openings from time to
time--openings to what? I do not know. A damp smell exhales from them,
and the air is cold upon my face as I pass them. At last a dim light
above. With the next turn a blinding glare of light, a moment's
blankness, then a vast panorama gradually dawns upon me. Through the
frame of stonework is a vast reach of grayish green bounded by the
horizon, an immense shield embossed with silvery lines of waterways, and
studded with clustering red-tiled roofs. A rim of pale yellow
appears--the sand-dunes that line the coast--and dimly beyond a grayish
film, evanescent, flashing--the North Sea.

Something flies through the slit from which I am gazing, and following
its flight upward, I see a long beam crossing the gallery, whereon are
perched an array of jackdaws gazing down upon me in wonder.

I am conscious of a rhythmic movement about me that stirs the air, a
mysterious, beating, throbbing sound, the machinery of the clock, which
some one has described as a "heart of iron beating in a breast of
stone."

I lean idly in the narrow slit, gazing at the softened landscape, the
exquisite harmony of the greens, grays, and browns, the lazily turning
arms of far-off mills, reminders of Cuyp, Van der Velde, Teniers,
shadowy, mysterious recollections. I am conscious of uttering aloud some
commonplaces of delight. A slight and sudden movement behind me, a
smothered cough. A little old man in a black velvet coat stands looking
up at me, twisting and untwisting his hands. There are ruffles at his
throat and wrists, and an amused smile spreads over his face, which is
cleanly shaven, of the color of wax, with a tiny network of red lines
over the cheek-bones, as if the blood had been forced there by some
excess of passion and had remained. He has heard my sentimental
ejaculation. I am conscious of the absurdity of the situation, and move
aside for him to pass. He makes a courteous gesture with one ruffled
hand.

There comes a prodigious rattling and grinding noise from above--then a
jangle of bells, some half-dozen notes in all. At the first stroke the
old man closes his eyes, throws back his head, and follows the rhythm
with his long white hands, as though playing a piano. The sound dies
away; the place becomes painfully silent; still the regular motion of
the old man's hands continues. A creepy, shivery feeling runs up and
down my spine; a fear of which I am ashamed seizes upon me.

"Fine pells, sare," says the little old man, suddenly dropping his
hands, and fixing his eyes upon me. "You sall not hear such pells in
your countree. But stay not here; come wis me, and I will show you the
clavecin. You sall not see the clavecin yet? No?"

I had not, of course, and thanked him.

"You sall see Melchior, Melchior t'e Groote, t'e magnif'."

As he spoke we entered a room quite filled with curious machinery, a
medley of levers, wires, and rope above; below, two large cylinders
studded with shining brass points.

He sprang among the wires with a spidery sort of agility, caught one,
pulled and hung upon it with, all his weight. There came a r-r-r-r-r-r
of fans and wheels, followed by a shower of dust; slowly one great
cylinder began to revolve; wires and ropes reaching into the gloom above
began to twitch convulsively; faintly came the jangle of far-off bells.
Then came a pause, then a deafening _boom_, that well nigh stunned me.
As the waves of sound came and went, the little old man twisted and
untwisted his hands in delight, and ejaculated, "Melchior you haf
heeard, Melchior t'e Groote--t'e bourdon."

I wanted to examine the machinery, but he impatiently seized my arm and
almost dragged me away saying, "I will skow you--I will skow you. Come
wis me."

From a pocket he produced a long brass key and unlocked a door covered
with red leather, disclosing an up-leading flight of steps to which he
pushed me. It gave upon an octagon-shaped room with a curious floor of
sheet-lead. Around the wall ran a seat under the diamond-paned Gothic
windows. From their shape I knew them to be the highest in the tower. I
had seen them from the square below many times, with the framework above
upon which hung row upon row of bells.

In the middle of the room was a rude sort of keyboard, with pedals
below, like those of a large organ. Fronting this construction sat a
long, high-backed bench. On the rack over the keyboard rested some
sheets of music, which, upon examination, I found to be of parchment and
written by hand. The notes were curious in shape, consisting of squares
of black and diamonds of red upon the lines. Across the top of the page
was written, in a straggling hand, "Van den Gheyn Nikolaas." I turned to
the little old man with the ruffles. "Van den Gheyn!" I said in
surprise, pointing to the parchment. "Why, that is the name of the most
celebrated of _carillonneurs_, Van den Gheyn of Louvain." He untwisted
his hands and bowed. "Eet ees ma name, mynheer--I am the
_carillonneur_."

I fancied that my face showed all too plainly the incredulity I felt,
for his darkened, and he muttered, "You not belief, Engelsch? Ah, I show
you; then you belief, parehap," and with astounding agility seated
himself upon the bench before the clavecin, turned up the ruffles at his
wrists, and literally threw himself upon the keys. A sound of thunder
accompanied by a vivid flash of lightning filled the air, even as the
first notes of the bells reached my ears. Involuntarily I glanced out of
the diamond-leaded window--dark clouds were all about us, the housetops
and surrounding country were no longer to be seen. A blinding flash of
lightning seemed to fill the room; the arms and legs of the little old
man sought the keys and pedals with inconceivable rapidity; the music
crashed about us with a deafening din, to the accompaniment of the
thunder, which seemed to sound in unison with the boom of the bourdon.
It was grandly terrible. The face of the little old man was turned upon
me, but his eyes were closed. He seemed to find the pedals intuitively,
and at every peal of thunder, which shook the tower to its foundations,
he would open his mouth, a toothless cavern, and shout aloud. I could
not hear the sounds for the crashing of the bells. Finally, with a last
deafening crash of iron rods and thunderbolts, the noise of the bells
gradually died away. Instinctively I had glanced above when the crash
came, half expecting to see the roof torn off.

"I think we had better go down," I said. "This tower has been struck by
lightning several times, and I imagine that discretion--"

I don't know what more I said, for my eyes rested upon the empty bench,
and the bare rack where the music had been. The clavecin was one mass of
twisted iron rods, tangled wires, and decayed, worm-eaten woodwork; the
little old man had disappeared. I rushed to the red leather-covered
door; it was fast. I shook it in a veritable terror; it would not yield.
With a bound I reached the ruined clavecin, seized one of the pedals,
and tore it away from the machine. The end was armed with an iron point.
This I inserted between the lock and the door. I twisted the lock from
the worm-eaten wood with one turn of the wrist, the door opened, and I
almost fell down the steep steps. The second door at the bottom was
also closed. I threw my weight against it once, twice; it gave, and I
half slipped, half ran down the winding steps in the darkness.

Out at last into the fresh air of the lower passage! At the noise I made
in closing the ponderous door came forth the old _custode_.

In my excitement I seized her by the arm, saying, "Who was the little
old man in the black velvet coat with the ruffles? Where is he?"

She looked at me in a stupid manner. "Who is he," I repeated--"the
little old man who played the clavecin?"

"Little old man, sir? I don't know," said the crone. "There has been no
one in the tower to-day but yourself."




LIGEIA

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

     "And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the
     mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great
     will prevading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth
     not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save
     only through the weakness of his feeble will."--JOSEPH
     GLANVILL.


I cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I
first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since
elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I
cannot _now_ bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the
character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid
caste of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low
musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and
stealthily progressive, that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I
believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old,
decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family I have surely heard her
speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia!
Ligeia! Buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to
deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word
alone--by Ligeia--that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of
her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon
me that I have _never known_ the paternal name of her who was my friend
and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally
the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia?
Or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no
inquiries upon this point? Or was it rather a caprice of my own--a
wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion?
I but indistinctly recall the fact itself--what wonder that I have
utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it?
And, indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled Romance--if ever she,
the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt--presided, as
they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over
mine.

There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is
the _person_ of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and,
in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray
the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible
lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a
shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study,
save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble
hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It
was the radiance of an opium-dream--an airy and spirit-lifting vision
more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering
souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that
regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the
classical labors of the heathen. "There is no exquisite beauty," says
Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and _genera_
of beauty, "without some strangeness in the proportion." Yet,
although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic
regularity--although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed
exquisite and felt that there was much of strangeness pervading it--yet
I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own
perception of "the strange." I examined the contour of the lofty and
pale forehead; it was faultless--how cold indeed that word when applied
to a majesty so divine--the skin rivalling the purest ivory; the
commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above
the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and
naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric
epithet, "hyacinthine"! I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose,
and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a
similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface,
the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same
harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the
sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly--the
magnificent turn of the short upper lip, the soft, voluptuous slumber of
the under, the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke, the
teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of
the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most
exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the
chin, and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness
and the majesty, the fulness and the spirituality of the Greek--the
contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the
son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligeia.

For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been,
too, that in these eyes of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord
Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary
eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the
gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at
intervals--in moments of intense excitement--that this peculiarity
became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was
her beauty--in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps--the beauty of
beings either above or apart from the earth--the beauty of the fabulous
Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black,
and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly
irregular in outline, had the same tint. The "strangeness," however,
which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation,
or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be
referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning, behind whose vast
latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the
spiritual! The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have
I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night,
struggled to fathom it! What was it--that something more profound than
the well of Democritus--which lay far within the pupils of my beloved?
What _was_ it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes,
those large, those shining, those divine orbs--they became to me twin
stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.

There is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the
science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact--never, I
believe, noticed in the schools--that in our endeavors to recall to
memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very
verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And
thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I
felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression--felt it
approaching, yet not quite be mine--and so at length entirely depart!
And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found in the commonest
objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I
mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia's beauty passed
into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived from many
existences in the material world a sentiment such as I felt always
around, within me, by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more
could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I
recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a
rapidly-growing vine, in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a
chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean, in
the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged
people. And there are one or two stars in heaven, (one especially, a
star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the
large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made
aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from
stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among
innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of
Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness--who shall
say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment: "And the will
therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will,
with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by
nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto
death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will."

Length of years and subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace,
indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English
moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in
thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result or at least an
index of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse,
failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of
all the women whom I have ever known, she--the outwardly calm, the
ever-placid Ligeia--was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous
vultures of stern passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate,
save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so
delighted and appalled me, by the almost magical melody, modulation,
distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice, and by the fierce
energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of
utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.

I have spoken of the learning of Ligeia; it was immense, such as I have
never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply
proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the
modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon
any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the
boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How
singularly, how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has
forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her
knowledge was such as I have never known in woman--but where breathes
the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of
moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now
clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were
astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to
resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the
chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily
occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a
triumph, with how vivid a delight, with how much of all that is ethereal
in hope, did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little
sought--but less known--that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding
before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path I might at
length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to
be forbidden!

How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some
years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves
and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her
presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many
mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting
the radiant luster of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew
duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less
frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild
eyes blazed with a too, too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became
of the transparent waxen hue of the grave; and the blue veins upon the
lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the most
gentle emotion. I saw that she must die--and I struggled desperately in
spirit with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife
were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had
been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to
her, death would have come without its terrors; but not so. Words are
impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with
which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable
spectacle. I would have soothed, I would have reasoned, but, in the
intensity of her wild desire for life--for life--_but_ for life--solace
and reason were alike the uttermost of folly. Yet not until the last
instance, amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was
shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more
gentle--grew more low--yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild
meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened,
entranced, to a melody more than mortal, to assumptions and aspirations
which mortality had never before known.

That she loved me I should not have doubted, and I might have been
easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no
ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the
strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she
pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate
devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by
such confessions? How had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of
my beloved in the hour of her making them? But upon this subject I
cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than
womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily
bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing, with so
wildly earnest a desire, for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly
away. It is this wild longing--it is this eager vehemence of desire for
life--but for life--that I have no power to portray, no utterance
capable of expressing.

At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me
peremptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by
herself not many days before. I obeyed her. They were these:

    Lo! 'tis a gala night
      Within the lonesome latter years!
    An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
      In veils, and drowned in tears,
    Sit in a theater, to see
      A play of hopes and fears,
    While the orchestra breathes fitfully
      The music of the spheres.

    Mimes, in the form of God on high,
      Mutter and mumble low,
    And hither and thither fly;
      Mere puppets they, who come and go
    At bidding of vast formless things
      That shift the scenery to and fro,
    Flapping from out their condor wings
      Invisible Woe!

    That motley drama!--oh, be sure
      It shall not be forgot!
    With its Phantom chased for evermore,
      By a crowd that seize it not,
    Through a circle that ever returneth in
      To the self-same spot;
    And much of Madness, and more of Sin
      And Horror, the soul of the plot!

    But see, amid the mimic rout
      A crawling shape intrude!
    A blood-red thing that writhes from out
      The scenic solitude!
    It writhes!--it writhes!--with mortal
      The mimes become its food,
    And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs
      In human gore imbued.

    Out--out are the lights--out all!
      And over each quivering form,
    The curtain, a funeral pall,
      Comes down with the rush of a storm--
    And the angels, all pallid and wan,
      Uprising, unveiling, affirm
    That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
      And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

"O God!" half-shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her
arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines,
"O God! O Divine Father! Shall these things be undeviatingly so? Shall
this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in
Thee? Who--who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man
doth not yield him to the angels, _nor unto death utterly_, save only
through the weakness of his feeble will."

And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to
fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her
last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I
bent to them my ear, and distinguished again, the concluding words of
the passage in Glanvill: "_Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor
unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will._"

She died, and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer
endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city
by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had
brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of
mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering,
I purchased and put in some repair an abbey which I shall not name in
one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The
gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of
the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with
both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which
had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet,
although the external abbey with its verdant decay hanging about it
suffered but little alteration, I gave way with a child-like perversity,
and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display
of more than regal magnificence within. For such follies, even in
childhood, I had imbibed a taste, and now they came back to me as if in
the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness
might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in
the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the
Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden
slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a
coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities I must not pause to
detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in
a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride--as the
successor of the unforgotten Ligeia--the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady
Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.

There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of
that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the
souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold,
they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment _so_ bedecked, a
maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember
the details of the chamber, yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep
moment; and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic
display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of
the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size.
Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole
window--an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice--a single pane,
and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon
passing through it fell with a ghastly luster on the objects within.
Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis-work of
an aged vine which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The
ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and
elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a
semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of
this melancholy vaulting depended, by a single chain of gold with long
links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with
many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as
if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of
parti-colored fires.

Some few ottomans and golden candelabra of Eastern figure were in
various stations about; and there was the couch, too--the bridal
couch--of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with
a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on
end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings
over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture.
But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief fantasy of all.
The lofty walls, gigantic in height--even unproportionably so--were hung
from summit to foot in vast folds with a heavy and massive-looking
tapestry--tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on
the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy
for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially
shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was
spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about
a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most
jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the
arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a
contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of
antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room
they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities, but upon a farther
advance this appearance gradually departed; and, step by step as the
visitor moved his station in the chamber he saw himself surrounded by an
endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition
of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The
phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial
introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the
draperies--giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.

In halls such as these--in a bridal chamber such as this--I passed, with
the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our
marriage--passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded
the fierce moodiness of my temper, that she shunned me, and loved me but
little, I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than
otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to
man. My memory flew back--oh, with what intensity of regret!--to Ligeia,
the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in
recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal
nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my
spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In
the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the
shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the
silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by
day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the
consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to
the pathway she had abandoned--ah, could it be for ever?--upon the
earth.

About the commencement of the second month of the marriage the Lady
Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was
slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in
her perturbed state of half-slumber she spoke of sounds and of motions
in and about the chamber of the turret which I concluded had no
origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the
phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length
convalescent--finally, well. Yet but a brief period elapsed ere a second
more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering, and from
this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered.
Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character and of more
alarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions
of her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease, which had
thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be
eradicated by human means, I could not fail to observe a similar
increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her
excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more
frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds--of the slight sounds--and
of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly
alluded.

One night near the closing in of September she pressed this distressing
subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had just
awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching, with feelings
half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated
countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the
ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low
whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear, of
motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was
rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what,
let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost
inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures
upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of
the wind. But a deadly pallor overspreading her face had proved to me
that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be
fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered where was
deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her
physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But as I
stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a
startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable
although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw
that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich
luster thrown from the censer, a shadow--a faint, indefinite shadow of
angelic aspect, such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade. But
I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and
heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having
found the wine, I recrossed the chamber and poured out a gobletful which
I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially
recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank upon an
ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that
I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet and near
the couch; and in a second after as Rowena was in the act of raising the
wine to her lips I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the
goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room,
three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby-colored fluid. If this
I saw--not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I
forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I
considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination,
rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by
the hour.

Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately
subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worse
took place in the disorder of my wife, so that, on the third subsequent
night the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb, and on the
fourth I sat alone with her shrouded body in that fantastic chamber
which had received her as my bride. Wild visions, opium-engendered,
fluttered, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the
sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the
drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censer
overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances of a
former night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had
seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer;
and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid
and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories
of Ligeia--and then came back upon my heart with the turbulent violence
of a flood the whole of that unutterable woe with which I had regarded
_her_ thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of
bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing
upon the body of Rowena.

It might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later--for I had
taken no note of time--when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct,
startled me from my revery. I _felt_ that it came from the bed of
ebony--the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious
terror--but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision
to detect any motion in the corpse--but there was not the slightest
perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I _had_ heard the
noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely
and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes
elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the
mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble and
barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks, and
along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of
unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no
sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my
limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to
restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been
precipitate in our preparations--that Rowena still lived. It was
necessary that some immediate exertion be made, yet the turret was
altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the
servants--there were none within call, and I had no means of summoning
them to my aid without leaving the room for many minutes--and this I
could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to
call back the spirit still hovering. In a short period it was certain,
however, that a relapse had taken place, the color disappeared from both
eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the
lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expression
of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the
surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately
supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had
been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate
waking visions of Ligeia.

An hour thus elapsed, when--could it be possible?--I was a second time
aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I
listened--in extremity of horror. The sound came again--it was a sigh.
Rushing to the corpse, I saw--distinctly saw--a tremor upon the lips. In
a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly
teeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which
had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, that
my reason wandered, and it was only by a violent effort that I at length
succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more had
pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon
the cheek and throat, a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame,
there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady _lived_; and
with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I
chafed and bathed the temples and the hands and used every exertion
which experience and no little medical reading could suggest. But in
vain. Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed
the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the whole body
took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense
rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of
that which has been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.

And again I sunk into visions of Ligeia--and again, (what marvel that I
shudder while I write?) _again_ there reached my ears a low sob from the
region of the ebony bed. But why should I minutely detail the
unspeakable horrors of that night? Why should I pause to relate how,
time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous
drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only
into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony
wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each
struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal
appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.

The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had
been dead, once again stirred--and now more vigorously than hitherto,
although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utter
hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and
remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of
violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible,
the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more
vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy
into the countenance, the limbs relaxed, and, save that the eyelids were
yet pressed heavily together and that the bandages and draperies of the
grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have
dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off utterly the fetters of Death.
But if this idea was not even then altogether adopted, I could at least
doubt no longer, when arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble
steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a
dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into
the middle of the apartment.

I trembled not--I stirred not--for a crowd of unutterable fancies
connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing
hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed--had chilled me into stone. I
stirred not--but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in
my thoughts--a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living
Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all--the
fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, _why_
should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth--but then
might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the
cheeks--there were the roses as in her noon of life--yes, these might
indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin,
with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers?--but _had she
then grown taller since her malady_? What inexpressible madness seized
me with that thought! One bound, and I had reached her feet. Shrinking
from my touch she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly
cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth into the
rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and dishevelled
hair; _it was blacker than the raven wings of midnight_! And now slowly
opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. "Here then, at
least," I shrieked aloud, "can I never--can I never be mistaken--these
are the full and the black, and the wild eyes of my lost love--of the
Lady--of the LADY LIGEIA."




THE SYLPH AND THE FATHER[5]

By ELSA BARKER

[Footnote 5: By permission of the author of _War Letters of the Living
Dead Man_ and Mitchell Kennerley.]


Passing yesterday along the line where the great French army stands
before its powerful opponent, and marking the spirit of courage and
aspiration which makes it seem like a long line of living light, I saw a
familiar face in the regions outside the physical.

I paused, highly pleased at the encounter, and the sylph--for it was a
sylph whom I met--paused also with a little smile of recognition.

Do you recall in my former book the story of a sylph, Meriline, who was
the companion and familiar of a student of magic who lived in the rue de
Vaugirard in Paris?

It was Meriline that I met above the line of light which shows to
wanderers in the astral regions where the soldiers of _la belle France_
fight and die for the same ideal which inspired Jeanne d'Arc--to drive
the foreigner out of France.

"Where is your friend and master?" I asked the sylph, and she pointed
below to a trench which spoke loud its determination to conquer.

"I am here, to be still with him," she said.

"And can you speak to him here?" I asked.

"I can always speak with him," she answered. "I have been very useful to
him--and to France."

"To France?" I enquired, with growing interest.

"Oh, yes! When his commanding officer wants to know what is being
plotted over there, he often asks my friend, and my friend asks me."

"Truly," I thought, "the French are an inspired people, when the
officers of armies ask guidance from the realm of the invisible! But had
not Jeanne her visions?"

"And how do you gain the information desired?" I asked, drawing nearer
to Meriline, who seemed more serious than when we met some years before
in Paris.

"Why," she answered, "I go over there and look around me. I have learned
what to look for, he has taught me, and when I bring him news he rewards
me with more love."

"And do you love him still, as of old?"

"As of old?"

"Yes, as you did back there in Paris."

"Time must have passed slowly with you," said the sylph, "if you call a
few years ago 'as of old'."

"Are a few years, then, as nothing?"

"A few years are as nothing to me," she replied. "I have lived a long
time."

"And do you know the future of your friend?" I asked.

A puzzled look came over the face of Meriline, and she said, slowly:

"I used to know everything that would happen to him, because I could
read his will, and whatever he willed came to pass; but since we have
been out here he seems to have lost his will."

"Lost his will!" I exclaimed, in surprise.

"Yes, lost his will; for he prays continually to a great Being whom he
loves far more than me, and he always prays one prayer, 'Thy will be
done!' It used to be his will which was always done; but now, as I say,
he seems to have lost his will."

"Perhaps," I said, "it is true of the will as was once said of the life,
and he that loses his will shall find it."

"I hope he will find it soon," she answered, "for in the old days he was
always giving me interesting things to do, to help him achieve the
purposes of his will, and now he only sends me over there. I don't like
_over there_!"

"Why not?"

"Because my friend is menaced by something over there."

"And what has his will to do with that?"

"Why, even about that, he says all day to the great Being that he loves
so much more than me, 'Thy will be done.'"

"Do you think you could learn to say it, too?" I asked.

"I say it after him sometimes; but I don't know what it means."

"Have you never heard of God?"

"I have heard of many gods, of Isis and Osiris and Set, and of Horus,
the son of Osiris."

"And is it to one of these that he says, 'Thy will be done'?"

"Oh, no! It is not to any of the gods that he used to call upon in his
magical working. This is some new god that he has found."

"Or the oldest of all gods that he has returned to," I suggested. "What
does he call Him?"

"Our Father who art in heaven."

"If you also should learn to say 'Thy will be done' to our Father who is
in heaven," I said, "it might help you toward the attainment of that
soul you were wanting and waiting for, when last we met in Paris."

"How could our Father help me?"

"It was He who gave souls to men," I said.

The eyes of the sylph were brilliant with something almost human.

"And could He give a soul to me?"

"It is said that He _can_ do anything."

"Then I will ask Him for a soul."

"But to ask Him for a soul," I said, "is not to pray the prayer your
friend prays."

"He only says----"

"Yes, I know. Suppose you say it after him."

"I will, if you will tell me what it means. I like to do what my friend
does."

"'Thy will be done,'" I said, "when addressed to the Father in heaven,
means that we give up all our desires, whether for pleasure or love or
happiness, or anything else, and lay all those desires at His feet,
sacrificing all we have or hope for to Him, because we love Him more
than ourselves."

"That is a strange way to get what one desires," she said.

"It is not done to get what one desires," I answered.

"But what is it done for?"

"For love of the Father in heaven."

"But I do not know the Father in heaven. What is He?"

"He is the Source and the Goal of the being of your friend. He is the
One that your friend will re-become some day, if he can forever say to
Him, Thy will be done."

"The One he will re-become?"

"Yes, for when he blends his will with that of the Father in heaven, the
Father in heaven dwells in his heart and the two become one."

"Then is the Father in heaven really the Self of my friend?"

"The greatest philosopher could not have expressed it more truly," I
said.

"Then indeed do I love the Father in heaven," breathed the sylph, "and I
will say now every day and all day, 'Thy will be done' to Him."

"Even if it separates you from your friend?"

"How can it separate me from my friend, if the Father is the Self of
him?"

"I would that all angels were your equal in learning," I said.

But Meriline had turned from me in utter forgetfulness, and was saying
over and over, with joy in her uplifted face, "Thy will be done! Thy
will be done!"

"Truly," I said to myself, as I passed along the line, "he who worships
the Father as the Self of the beloved has already acquired a soul."




A GHOST[6]

BY LAFCADIO HEARN

[Footnote 6: From _Karma_ (Boni & Liveright).]


I

Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may
pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than
likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, whose
wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasure,
but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being--the man whose
inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of
a society to which he belongs only by accident. However intellectually
trained, he must always remain the slave of singular impulses which have
no rational source, and which will often amaze him no less by their
mastering power than by their continuous savage opposition to his every
material interest. These may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral
habit--be explained by self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps
they may not,--in which event the victim can only surmise himself the
_Imago_ of some pre-existent larval aspiration--the full development of
desires long dormant in a chain of more limited lives.

Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the class, take
infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to environment--the line
of least resistance for one being that of greatest resistance for
another; no two courses of true nomadism can ever be wholly the same.
Diversified of necessity both impulse and direction, even as human
nature is diversified! Never since consciousness of time began were two
beings born who possessed exactly the same quality of voice, the same
precise degree of nervous impressibility, or, in brief, the same
combination of those viewless force-storing molecules which shape and
poise themselves in sentient substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to
particularize the curious psychology of such existences; at the very
utmost it is possible only to describe such impulses and preceptions of
nomadism as lie within the very small range of one's own observation.
And whatever in these is strictly personal can have little interest or
value except in so far as it holds something in common with the great
general experience of restless lives. To such experience may belong, I
think, one ultimate result of all those irrational partings,
self-wrecking, sudden isolations, abrupt severances from all attachment,
which form the history of the nomad--the knowledge that a strong silence
is ever deepening and expanding about one's life, and that in that
silence there are ghosts.


II

Oh! the first vague charm, the first sunny illusion of some fair
city, when vistas of unknown streets all seem leading to the
realization of a hope you dare not even whisper; when even the shadows
look beautiful, and strange facades appear to smile good omen through
light of gold! And those first winning relations with men, while you are
still a stranger, and only the better and the brighter side of their
nature is turned to you! All is yet a delightful, luminous
indefiniteness--sensation of streets and of men--like some beautifully
tinted photograph slightly out of focus.

Then the slow solid sharpening of details all about you, thrusting
through illusion and dispelling it, growing keener and harder day by day
through long dull seasons; while your feet learn to remember all
asperities of pavements, and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings and
of persons--failures of masonry, furrowed lines of pain. Thereafter only
the aching of monotony intolerable, and the hatred of sameness grown
dismal, and dread of the merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly
repetition of things; while those impulses of unrest, which are Nature's
urgings through that ancestral experience which lives in each one of
us--outcries of sea and peak and sky to man--ever make wilder appeal.
Strong friendships may have been formed; but there finally comes a day
when even these can give no consolation for the pain of monotony, and
you feel that in order to live you must decide, regardless of result, to
shake forever from your feet the familiar dust of that place.

And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or
steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the
old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment--not as
if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if
pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may come
to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a friend misapprehended
and unjustly judged. But you will never more see those streets--except
in dreams.

Through sleep only they will open again before you, steeped in the
illusive vagueness of the first long-past day, peopled only by friends
outstretching to you. Soundlessly you will tread those shadowy pavements
many times, to knock in thought, perhaps, at doors which the dead will
open to you. But with the passing of years all becomes dim--so dim that
even asleep you know 'tis only a ghost-city, with streets going to
nowhere. And finally whatever is left of it becomes confused and blended
with cloudy memories of other cities--one endless bewilderment of filmy
architecture in which nothing is distinctly recognizable, though the
whole gives the sensation of having been seen before, ever so long ago.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meantime, in the course of wanderings more or less aimless, there has
slowly grown upon you a suspicion of being haunted--so frequently does a
certain hazy presence intrude itself upon the visual memory. This,
however, appears to gain rather than to lose in definiteness; with each
return its visibility seems to increase. And the suspicion that you may
be haunted gradually develops into a certainty.


III

You are haunted--whether your way lie through the brown gloom of London
winter, or the azure splendor of an equatorial day--whether your steps
be tracked in snows, or in the burning black sand of a tropic
beach--whether you rest beneath the swart shade of Northern pines, or
under spidery umbrages of palm--you are haunted ever and everywhere by a
certain gentle presence. There is nothing fearsome in this haunting--the
gentlest face, the kindliest voice--oddly familiar and distinct, though
feeble as the hum of a bee.

But it tantalizes--this haunting--like those sudden surprises of
sensation _within_ us, though seemingly not _of_ us, which some dreamers
have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances, recollections of
preexistence. Vainly you ask yourself, "Whose voice? Whose face?" It is
neither young nor old, the Face; it has a vapory indefinableness that
leaves it a riddle; its diaphaneity reveals no particular tint; perhaps
you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard. But its
expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling--like the smiling of
unknown friends in dreams, with infinite indulgence for any folly, even
a dream-folly. Except in that you cannot permanently banish it, the
presence offers no positive resistance to your will; it accepts each
caprice with obedience; it meets your every whim with angelic patience.
It is never critical, never makes plaint even by a look, never proves
irksome; yet you cannot ignore it, because of a certain queer power it
possesses to make something stir and quiver in your heart--like an old
vague sweet regret--something buried alive which will not die. And so
often does this happen that desire to solve the riddle becomes a pain;
that you finally find yourself making supplication to the Presence;
addressing to it questions which it will never answer directly, but
only by a smile or by words having no relation to the asking--words
enigmatic, which make mysterious agitation in old forsaken fields of
memory, even as a wind betimes, over wide wastes of marsh, sets all the
grasses whispering about nothing. But you will question on, untiringly,
through the nights and days of years:

"Who are you? What are you? What is this weird relation that you bear to
me? All you say to me I feel that I have heard before, but where? But
when? By what name am I to call you, since you will answer to none that
I remember? Surely you do not live; yet I know the sleeping-places of
all my dead, and yours I do not know! Neither are you any dream--for
dreams distort and change; and you, you are ever the same. Nor are you
any hallucination; for all my senses are still vivid and strong. This
only I know beyond doubt--that you are of the Past; you belong to
memory--but to the memory of what dead suns?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Then, some day or night, unexpectedly, there comes to you at least, with
a soft swift tingling shock as of fingers invisible, the knowledge that
the Face is not the memory of any one face; but a multiple image formed
of the traits of many dear faces, superimposed by remembrance, and
interblended by affection into one ghostly personality--infinitely
sympathetic, phantasmally beautiful--a Composite of recollections! And
the Voice is the echo of no one voice, but the echoing of many voices,
molten into a single utterance, a single impossible tone, thin through
remoteness of time, but inexpressibly caressing.


IV

Thou most gentle Composite!--thou nameless and exquisite Unreality,
thrilled into semblance of being from out the sum of all lost
sympathies!--thou Ghost of all dear vanished things, with thy vain
appeal of eyes that looked for my coming, and vague faint pleading of
voices against oblivion, and thin electric touch of buried hands--must
thou pass away forever with my passing, even as the Shadow that I cast,
O thou Shadowing of Souls?

I am not sure. For there comes to me this dream--that if aught in human
life hold power to pass, like a swerved sunray through interstellar
spaces, into the infinite mystery, to send one sweet strong vibration
through immemorial Time, might not some luminous future be peopled with
such as thou? And in so far as that which makes for us the subtlest
charm of being can lend one choral note to the Symphony of the
Unknowable Purpose--in so much might there not endure also to greet
thee, another Composite One--embodying, indeed, the comeliness of many
lives, yet keeping likewise some visible memory of all that may have
been gracious in this thy friend?




THE EYES OF THE PANTHER[7]

BY AMBROSE BIERCE

[Footnote 7: From "_In the Midst of Life_" (Boni & Liveright).]


I

ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS MARRY WHEN INSANE

A man and a woman--nature had done the grouping--sat on a rustic seat,
in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with
the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate--a man at whom
one would look again. The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with
something in her figure and movements suggesting the word "lithe." She
was habited in a gray gown with odd brown markings in the texture. She
may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied
attention to all else. They were gray-green, long and narrow, with an
expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were
disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.

The man and the woman talked.

"Yes," said the woman, "I love you, God knows! But marry you, no. I
cannot, will not."

"Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a
reason. I've a right to know, to understand, to feel and prove my
fortitude if I have it. Give me a reason."

"For loving you?"

The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor. That did not
stir any sense of humor in the man.

"No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I've a
right to know. I must know. I will know!"

He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his
face a frown--it might have been called a scowl. He looked as if he
might attempt to learn by strangling her. She smiled no more--merely sat
looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly
without emotion or sentiment. Yet it had something in it that tamed his
resentment and made him shiver.

"You are determined to have my reason?" she asked in a tone that was
entirely mechanical--a tone that might have been her look made audible.

"If you please--if I'm not asking too much."

Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion
over his co-creature.

"Very well, you shall know: I am insane."

The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought
to be amused. But, again, the sense of humor failed him in his need and
despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did
not believe. Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good
understanding.

"That is what the physicians would say," the woman continued, "if they
knew. I might myself prefer to call it a case of 'possession.' Sit down
and hear what I have to say."

The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the
wayside. Over against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills
were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that
peculiar quality that foretells the twilight. Something of its
mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man's
mood. In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages
of night. Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of
the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes
always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story
told by Irene Marlowe. In deference to the reader's possible prejudice
against the artless method of an unpracticed historian the author
ventures to substitute his own version for hers.


II

A ROOM MAY BE TOO NARROW FOR THREE, THOUGH ONE IS OUTSIDE

In a little log house containing a single room sparely and rudely
furnished, crouching on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman,
clasping to her breast a child. Outside, a dense unbroken forest
extended for many miles in every direction. This was at night and the
room was black dark; no human eye could have discerned the woman and the
child. Yet they were observed, narrowly, vigilantly, with never even a
momentary slackening of attention; and that is the pivotal fact upon
which this narrative turns.

Charles Marlowe was of the class, now extinct in this country, of
woodmen pioneers--men who found their most acceptable surroundings in
sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the
Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more
than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after
generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage
children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow, no sooner
reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty
successors. At last they burst through the edge of the forest into the
open country and vanished as if they had fallen over a cliff. The
woodman pioneer is no more; the pioneer of the plains--he whose easy
task it was to subdue for occupancy two-thirds of the country in a
single generation--is another and inferior creation. With Charles
Marlowe in the wilderness, sharing the dangers, hardships and privations
of that strange unprofitable life, were his wife and child, to whom, in
the manner of his class in which the domestic virtues were a religion,
he was passionately attached. The woman was still young enough to be
comely, new enough to the awful isolation of her lot to be cheerful. By
withholding the large capacity for happiness which the simple
satisfactions of the forest life could not have filled, Heaven had dealt
honorably with her. In her light household tasks, her child, her husband
and her few foolish books, she found abundant provision for her needs.

One morning in midsummer Marlowe took down his rifle from the wooden
hooks on the wall and signified his intention of getting game.

"We've meat enough," said the wife; "please don't go out to-day. I
dreamed last night, O, such a dreadful thing! I cannot recollect it, but
I'm almost sure that it will come to pass if you go out."

It is painful to confess that Marlowe received this solemn statement
with less of gravity than was due to the mysterious nature of the
calamity foreshadowed. In truth, he laughed.

"Try to remember," he said. "Maybe you dreamed that Baby had lost the
power of speech."

The conjecture was obviously suggested by the fact that Baby, clinging
to the fringe of his hunting-coat with all her ten pudgy thumbs, was at
that moment uttering her sense of the situation in a series of exultant
goo-goos inspired by sight of her father's raccoon-skin cap.

The woman yielded: lacking the gift of humor she could not hold out
against his kindly badinage. So, with a kiss for the mother and a kiss
for the child, he left the house and closed the door upon his happiness
forever.

At nightfall he had not returned. The woman prepared supper and waited.
Then she put Baby to bed and sang softly to her until she slept. By this
time the fire on the hearth, at which she had cooked supper, had burned
out and the room was lighted by a single candle. This she afterward
placed in the open window as a sign and welcome to the hunter if he
should approach from that side. She had thoughtfully closed and barred
the door against such wild animals as might prefer it to an open
window--of the habits of beasts of prey in entering a house uninvited
she was not advised, though with true female prevision she may have
considered the possibility of their entrance by way of the chimney. As
the night wore on she became not less anxious, but more drowsy, and at
last rested her arms upon the bed by the child and her head upon the
arms. The candle in the window burned down to the socket, sputtered and
flared a moment and went out unobserved; for the woman slept and
dreamed.

In her dreams she sat beside the cradle of a second child. The first one
was dead. The father was dead. The home in the forest was lost and the
dwelling in which she lived was unfamiliar. There were heavy oaken
doors, always closed, and outside the windows, fastened into the thick
stone walls, were iron bars, obviously (so she thought) a provision
against Indians. All this she noted with an infinite self-pity, but
without surprise--an emotion unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle
was invisible under its coverlet which something impelled her to remove.
She did so, disclosing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this
dreadful revelation the dreamer awoke, trembling in the darkness of her
cabin in the wood.

As a sense of her actual surroundings came slowly back to her she felt
for the child that was not a dream, and assured herself by its breathing
that all was well with it; nor could she forbear to pass a hand lightly
across its face. Then, moved by some impulse for which she probably
could not have accounted, she rose and took the sleeping babe in her
arms, holding it close against her breast. The head of the child's cot
was against the wall to which the woman now turned her back as she
stood. Lifting her eyes she saw two bright objects starring the darkness
with a reddish-green glow. She took them to be two coals on the hearth,
but with her returning sense of direction came the disquieting
consciousness that they were not in that quarter of the room, moreover
were too high, being nearly at the level of the eyes--of her own eyes.
For these were the eyes of a panther.

The beast was at the open window directly opposite and not five paces
away. Nothing but those terrible eyes was visible, but in the dreadful
tumult of her feelings as the situation disclosed itself to her
understanding she somehow knew that the animal was standing on its
hinder feet, supporting itself with its paws on the window-ledge. That
signified a malign interest--not the mere gratification of an indolent
curiosity. The consciousness of the attitude was an added horror,
accentuating the menace of those awful eyes, in whose steadfast fire her
strength and courage were alike consumed. Under their silent questioning
she shuddered and turned sick. Her knees failed her, and by degrees,
instinctively striving to avoid a sudden movement that might bring the
beast upon her, she sank to the floor, crouched against the wall and
tried to shield the babe with her trembling body without withdrawing her
gaze from the luminous orbs that were killing her. No thought of her
husband came to her in her agony--no hope nor suggestion of rescue or
escape. Her capacity for thought and feeling had narrowed to the
dimensions of a single emotion--fear of the animal's spring, of the
impact of its body, the buffeting of its great arms, the feel of its
teeth in her throat, the mangling of her babe. Motionless now and in
absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to
years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch.

       *       *       *       *       *

Returning to his cabin late at night with a deer on his shoulders
Charles Marlowe tried the door. It did not yield. He knocked; there was
no answer. He laid down his deer and went around to the window. As he
turned the angle of the building he fancied he heard a sound as of
stealthy footfalls and a rustling in the undergrowth of the forest, but
they were too slight for certainty, even to his practiced ear.
Approaching the window, and to his surprise finding it open, he threw
his leg over the sill and entered. All was darkness and silence. He
groped his way to the fire-place, struck a match and lit a candle. Then
he looked about. Cowering on the floor against a wall was his wife,
clasping his child. As he sprang toward her she rose and broke into
laughter, long, loud, and mechanical, devoid of gladness and devoid of
sense--the laughter that is not out of keeping with the clanking of a
chain. Hardly knowing what he did he extended his arms. She laid the
babe in them. It was dead--pressed to death in its mother's embrace.


III

THE THEORY OF THE DEFENSE

That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did
Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her.
When she had concluded the sun was below the horizon and the long
summer twilight had begun to deepen in the hollows of the land. For some
moments Brading was silent, expecting the narrative to be carried
forward to some definite connection with the conversation introducing
it; but the narrator was as silent as he, her face averted, her hands
clasping and unclasping themselves as they lay in her lap, with a
singular suggestion of an activity independent of her will.

"It is a sad, a terrible story," said Brading at last, "but I do not
understand. You call Charles Marlowe father; that I know. That he is old
before his time, broken by some great sorrow, I have seen, or thought I
saw. But, pardon me, you said that you--that you--"

"That I am insane," said the girl, without a movement of head or body.

"But, Irene, you say--please, dear, do not look away from me--you say
that the child was dead, not demented."

"Yes, that one--I am the second. I was born three months after that
night, my mother being mercifully permitted to lay down her life in
giving me mine."

Brading was again silent; he was a trifle dazed and could not at once
think of the right thing to say. Her face was still turned away. In his
embarrassment he reached impulsively toward the hands that lay closing
and unclosing in her lap, but something--he could not have said
what--restrained him. He then remembered, vaguely, that he had never
altogether cared to take her hand.

"Is it likely," she resumed, "that a person born under such
circumstances is like others--is what you call sane?"

Brading did not reply; he was preoccupied with a new thought that was
taking shape in his mind--what a scientist would have called an
hypothesis; a detective, a theory. It might throw an added light, albeit
a lurid one, upon such doubt of her sanity as her own assertion had not
dispelled.

The country was still new and, outside the villages, sparsely populated.
The professional hunter was still a familiar figure, and among his
trophies were heads and pelts of the larger kinds of game. Tales
variously credible of nocturnal meetings with savage animals in lonely
roads were sometimes current, passed through the customary stages of
growth and decay, and were forgotten. A recent addition to these popular
apocrypha, originating, apparently, by spontaneous generation in several
households, was of a panther which had frightened some of their members
by looking in at windows by night. The yarn had caused its little ripple
of excitement--had even attained to the distinction of a place in the
local newspaper; but Brading had given it no attention. Its likeness to
the story to which he had just listened now impressed him as perhaps
more than accidental. Was it not possible that the one story had
suggested the other--that finding congenial conditions in a morbid mind
and a fertile fancy, it had grown to the tragic tale that he had heard?

Brading recalled certain circumstances of the girl's history and
disposition of which, with love's incuriosity, he had hitherto been
heedless--such as her solitary life with her father, at whose house no
one apparently was an acceptable visitor, and her strange fear of the
night by which those who knew her best accounted for her never being
seen after dark. Surely in such a mind imagination once kindled might
burn with a lawless flame, penetrating and enveloping the entire
structure. That she was mad, though the conviction gave him the acutest
pain, he could no longer doubt; she had only mistaken an effect of her
mental disorder for its cause, bringing into imaginary relation with her
own personality the vagaries of the local myth-makers. With some vague
intention of testing his new "theory," and no very definite notion of
how to set about it he said gravely, but with hesitation:

"Irene, dear, tell me--I beg you will not take offense, but tell me--"

"I have told you," she interrupted, speaking with a passionate
earnestness that he had not known her to show, "I have already told you
that we cannot marry; is anything else worth saying?"

Before he could stop her she had sprung from her seat and without
another word or look was gliding away among the trees toward her
father's house. Brading had risen to detain her; he stood watching her
in silence until she had vanished in the gloom. Suddenly he started as
if he had been shot, his face took on an expression of amazement and
alarm: in one of the black shadows into which she had disappeared he had
caught a quick, brief glimpse of shining eyes! For an instant he was
dazed and irresolute; then he dashed into the wood after her, shouting,
"Irene, Irene, look out! The panther! The panther!"

In a moment he had passed through the fringe of forest into open ground
and saw the girl's gray skirt vanishing into her father's door. No
panther was visible.


IV

AN APPEAL TO THE CONSCIENCE OF GOD

Jenner Brading, attorney-at-law, lived in a cottage at the edge of the
town. Directly behind the dwelling was the forest. Being a bachelor, and
therefore by the Draconian moral code of the time and place denied the
services of the only species of domestic servant known thereabout, the
"hired girl," he boarded at the village hotel where also was his office.
The woodside cottage was merely a lodging maintained--at no great cost,
to be sure--as an evidence of prosperity and respectability. It would
hardly do for one to whom the local newspaper had pointed with pride as
"the foremost jurist of his time" to be "homeless," albeit he may
sometimes have suspected that the words "home" and "house" were not
strictly synonymous. Indeed, his consciousness of the disparity and his
will to harmonize it were matters of logical inference, for it was
generally reported that soon after the cottage was built its owner had
made a futile venture in the direction of marriage--had, in truth, gone
so far as to be rejected by the beautiful but eccentric daughter of Old
Man Marlowe, the recluse. This was publicly believed because he had told
it himself and she had not--a reversal of the usual order of things
which could hardly fail to carry conviction.

Brading's bedroom was at the rear of the house, with a single window
facing the forest. One night he was awakened by a noise at that
window--he could hardly have said what it was like. With a little thrill
of the nerves he sat up in bed and laid hold of the revolver which, with
a forethought most commendable in one addicted to the habit of sleeping
on the ground floor with an open window, he had put under his pillow.
The room was in absolute darkness, but being unterrified he knew where
to direct his eyes, and there he held them, awaiting in silence what
further might occur. He could now dimly discern the aperture--a square
of lighter black. Presently there appeared at its lower edge two
gleaming eyes that burned with a malignant luster inexpressibly
terrible! Brading's heart gave a great jump, then seemed to stand still.
A chill passed along his spine and through his hair; he felt the blood
forsake his cheeks. He could not have cried out--not to save his life;
but being a man of courage he would not, to save his life, have done so
if he had been able. Some trepidation his coward body might feel, but
his spirit was of sterner stuff. Slowly the shining eyes rose with a
steady motion that seemed an approach, and slowly rose Brading's right
hand, holding the pistol. He fired!

Blinded by the flash and stunned by the report, Brading nevertheless
heard, or fancied that he heard, the wild high scream of the panther, so
human in sound, so devilish in suggestion. Leaping from the bed he
hastily clothed himself and pistol in hand, sprang from the door,
meeting two or three men who came running up from the road. A brief
explanation was followed by a cautious search of the house. The grass
was wet with dew; beneath the window it had been trodden and partly
leveled for a wide space, from which a devious trail, visible in the
light of a lantern, led away into the bushes. One of the men stumbled
and fell upon his hands, which as he rose and rubbed them together were
slippery. On examination they were seen to be red with blood.

An encounter, unarmed, with a wounded panther was not agreeable to their
taste; all but Brading turned back. He, with lantern and pistol, pushed
courageously forward into the wood. Passing through a difficult
undergrowth he came into a small opening, and there his courage had its
reward, for there he found the body of his victim. But it was no
panther. What it was is told, even to this day, upon a weather-worn
headstone in the village churchyard, and for many years was attested
daily at the graveside by the bent figure and sorrow-seamed face of Old
Man Marlowe, to whose soul, and to the soul of his strange, unhappy
child, peace--peace and reparation.




PHOTOGRAPHING INVISIBLE BEINGS

BY WM. T. STEAD

    "Millions of Spiritual creatures walk the earth
    Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep."

    --MILTON


It was during the South African War that my father obtained one of his
best authenticated spirit photographs, so I think that it is well to
give here his own account of his experiments in that direction. He
writes:

"While recording the results at which I have arrived, I wish to
repudiate any desire to dogmatize as to their significance or their
origin. I merely record the facts, and although I may indicate
conclusions and inferences which I have drawn from them, I attach no
importance to anything but the facts themselves.

"There is living in London at the present moment an old man of
seventy-one years of age, a man of no education; he can write, but he
cannot spell, and he has for many years earned his living as a
photographer. He was always in a small way of business, a quiet,
inoffensive man who brought up his family respectably, and lived in
peace with his neighbors, attracting no particular remark....

"When he started in business as a photographer it was in the days when
the wet process was almost universal, and he was much annoyed by finding
that when he exposed plates other forms than that of the sitter would
appear in the background. So many plates were spoiled by these unwelcome
intruders that his partner became very angry, and insisted that the
plates had not been washed before they were used. He protested this was
not so, and asked his partner to bring a packet of completely new plates
with which he would take a photograph and see what was the result. His
partner accepted the challenge, and produced a plate which had never
previously been used; but when the portrait of the next sitter was
taken, there appeared a shadow form in the background. Angry and
frightened at this unwelcome appearance he flung the plate to the ground
with an oath, and from that time for very many years he was never again
troubled by an occurrence of similar phenomena.

"About ten years ago he became interested in spiritualism, and to his
surprise, and also to his regret, the shadow figures began to re-appear
on the background of the photographs. He repeatedly had to destroy
negatives and ask his customer to give him another sitting. It did his
business harm, and in order to avoid this annoyance he left most of the
photographing to his son.

"I happened to hear of these curious experiences of his and sought him
out. I found him very reluctant to speak about the matter. He said
frankly he did not know how the figures came; it had been a great
annoyance to him, and it gave his shop a bad name. He did not wish
anything to be said about the matter. In deference, however, to repeated
pressing on my part, he consented to make experiments with me, and I
had at various times a considerable number of sittings.

"At first I brought my own plates (half plate size). He allowed me to
place them in his slide in the dark room, to put them in the camera,
which I was allowed to turn inside-out, and after they were exposed I
was permitted to go into the dark room and develop them in his presence.
Under these conditions I repeatedly obtained pictures of persons who
were certainly not visible to me in the studio. I was allowed to do
almost anything that I pleased, to alter the background, to change the
position of the camera, to sit at any angle that I chose--in short to
act as if the studio and all belonging to it was my own. And I
repeatedly obtained what the old photographer called 'shadow pictures,'
but none of them bore any resemblance to any person whom I had known.

"In all these earlier experiments the photographer, whom I will call Mr.
B----, made no charge, and the only request that he made was that I
should not publish his name, or do anything to let his neighbors know of
the curious shadow pictures which were obtainable in his studio.

"After a time I was so thoroughly satisfied that the shadow photographs,
or spirit forms, were not produced by any fraud on the part of the
photographer, that I did not trouble to bring my own marked plates--I
allowed him to use his own, and to do all the work of loading the slide
and of developing the plate without my assistance or supervision. What I
wanted was to see whether it would be possible for me to obtain a
photograph of any person known to me in life who has passed over to the
other side. The production of one such picture, if the person was
unknown to the photographer, and he had no means of obtaining the
photograph of the original while on earth, seemed to me so much better a
test of the genuineness of the phenomena than could be secured by any
amount of personal supervision of the process of photography, that I
left him to operate without interference. The results he obtained when
left to himself were precisely the same as those when the slides passed
only through my own hands. But, although I obtained a great variety of
portraits of unknown persons, I got none whom I could recognize.

"In a conversation with Mr. B-- as to how these shadow pictures, as he
called them, came on the plate, I found him almost as much at sea as
myself. He said that he did not know how they came, but that he had
noticed that they came more frequently and with greater distinctness at
some times than at others. He could never say beforehand whether they
would come or not. He frequently informed me when my sitting began that
he could guarantee nothing. And often the set of plates would bear no
trace of any portrait save mine.

"He was very reluctant to continue the experiments, and used to complain
that after exposing four plates with a view to obtaining such pictures
he felt quite exhausted. And sometimes he complained that his 'innards
seemed to be turned upside-down,' to use his own phrase. I usually sat
with him between two and three in the afternoon, and on the days which I
came he always abstained from the usual glass of beer which he took with
his midday meal. If I came unexpectedly, and he had had a single glass
of beer, which formed his usual beverage, he would always assure me
that I need not expect any good results. I, however, never found any
particular difference in the results.

"We often discussed the matter together. And he was evidently working
out a theory of his own, as any one might under such circumstances. He
knew that when he was excited or irritated he got bad results. Hence he
often used to keep a music-box going, for the music, in his opinion,
tended to set up good and tranquil conditions. He said he thought
something must come out of him--what, he did not know, but something was
taken out of him, and with this something he thought the entities,
whoever they were, built themselves up and acquired sufficient substance
to reflect the rays of light so as to impress the sensitive plate in his
camera. He also thought that his old camera had become what he called
magnetized, and although it was an old-fashioned piece of furniture,
which I not only examined myself, but have had examined by expert
photographers, nothing could be discovered within or without it which
would account for the results obtained. He also was of the opinion that
even although he did not touch the photographic plate, it was necessary
for him to touch or to hold his hand over the photographic slide, and
also to hold his hand over the plate when it was in the developing bath.
His theory was that in some way or other this process magnetized the
plate and brought out a shadow portrait.

"One peculiarity of almost all the shadow pictures obtained in all these
series of experiments is that they have around them the same kind of
white drapery which is so familiar to those who have taken part in a
materializing seance. Sometimes this drapery is more voluminous than at
others; often, when the conditions are good, the form which at first
appears with its head encompassed with drapery will appear on the second
plate without any drapery. On asking Mr. B-- what explanation he could
give for this, he said he did not know, but he believed that the bodily
appearance assumed by the spirit was very sensitive and needed to be
shielded from currents, which might harm it. But when harmony prevailed
they could venture to remove the drapery, and be photographed without
it. Whatever may be the value of Mr. B--'s theory, there is little doubt
that something is given off from his body which can be photographed. The
white mist that appears to emanate from him forms into cloudy folds out
of which there protrudes a more or less clearly defined face with human
features. Sometimes this white and misty cloud obscures the sitter, at
other times it seems to be condensed as if it were in the process of
being worked up into a definite form for the completion of which either
time or some other conditions were lacking. It was also noticeable that
the entity--whoever it may be--which builds up the form, who is giving
off sufficient solidity to impress its image upon the plate in the
camera, having once created a form, will use it repeatedly without any
change of position or expression. This will no doubt seem a great
stumbling-block to many. But the fact is as I have stated it, and our
first business is to ascertain facts, whether they tell for or against
any particular hypothesis. It may be that the disembodied spirit, in
order to establish its identity, constructs, out of the 'aura' given off
by the photographer or other medium, a mask or cast bearing the
unmistakable resemblance to the body which it wore in its sojourn on
earth. Having once built it up for use in the studio, it may be easier
to employ the same cast again and again instead of building up a new one
at each fresh sitting. Upon this point, however, I shall have something
to say further on.

"I was very much interested in the results I obtained, although as none
of the photographs were identified I did not deem the experiment
completely successful. I was very anxious to induce Mr. B-- to devote
some months to an uninterrupted series of experiments, and asked him on
what terms I could secure his services. But he absolutely refused; he
said he did not like it, it made him unwell, made people speak ill of
him, and it did not matter what terms were offered, he would not
consent. He was an old man, he said, and he could not find out how these
things came; and, in short, neither scientific curiosity nor financial
consideration would induce him to consent to more than an occasional
sitting. I therefore dropped the matter, and for some years I
discontinued my experiments.

"I had a friend who often accompanied me to Mr. B--'s studio, where she
had been photographed both with and without shadow pictures appearing on
the background. We often promised each other that if either of us passed
over we would come back and be photographed by Mr. B-- if possible, in
order to prove the reality of spirit return. Shortly after this my
friend died. But it was not until nearly four years after her death, at
the request of a friend who was very anxious to know whether she could
communicate with those on the other side, that I went back to Mr. B--'s
studio.

"He had always been slightly clairvoyant and clairaudient. He told me
that a few days before I had written asking for the appointment, my
deceased friend had appeared in the studio and told him that I was
coming. This reminded me of her promise, and I said at once that I hoped
he would be able to photograph her. He said he didn't know; he was
rather frightened of her, for reasons into which I need not enter, but
if she came he would see what he could do. My friend and I sat together.
The first plate was exposed, nothing appeared in the background. When
the second plate was placed in the camera Mr. B-- nodded with a quick
look of recognition. We saw nothing. After he had exposed the second
plate and before he developed it he asked us to change seats. We did
this, and as he was exposing the third plate he said, 'I am told to ask
you to do this,' and then when he closed the shutter he said, 'it is
Mrs. M--.' On the fourth plate there appeared a picture of a woman whom
I had never seen before, and whom my friend had never seen, neither had
Mr. B--. When the plates came to be developed I found the second and
third plates contained unmistakable likenesses of my friend Mrs. M--.
These portraits were immediately recognized by my friend as unmistakable
likenesses of the deceased Mrs. M--. It will be objected that she had
frequently been photographed by the same photographer, and that he had
simply faked a photograph from one of his old negatives. I don't believe
that this is possible, for these portraits, although recognized
immediately by every one who knew her, including her nearest relative,
are quite different from any photograph she ever had taken in life. She
certainly never was photographed enveloped in white drapery, nor do I
believe that Mr. B-- had any negative of any of her portraits in his
possession. But I fully admit that from the point of view of one who
wishes to exclude every possibility of error, the fact that Mrs. M-- had
been frequently photographed in her lifetime by the same photographer
renders it impossible to regard these photographs as conclusive
testimony as to their authenticity as a photograph of a form assumed by
a disembodied spirit. I have mentioned that on the fourth plate there
appeared a portrait of an unknown female. On my return I was showing the
print of this shadow picture to a friend when she startled me by
declaring that the shrouded form which appeared behind me in the
photograph was a portrait of her mother who had died some months before
in Dublin. I had never seen her mother, my friend did not know of her
existence, neither did the photographer, nor does he to this day. It was
only many months afterwards that I was able to obtain a photograph of my
friend's mother, but it was taken when she was a comparatively young
woman and bore no manner of resemblance to the portrait of the lady who
appeared behind me. Her daughter, however, had not the slightest
hesitation in asserting that it was her mother, that she had recognized
her instantly, and that it was a very good portrait of her as she
appeared in the later years of her life. This startled me not a little,
and convinced me that I had a good prospect of attaining some definite
results as an outcome of my experiments.

"Mr. B--, encouraged by this success, was willing to continue his
experiments, and this time I insisted upon paying him for his work.

"From this time onward the occurrence of photographs that were
recognizable on the background of the photographs taken by Mr. B--
became frequent. Sometimes the plates were marked; but not invariably.
For my part I attach comparatively no importance to the marking of
plates and the close supervision of the operator. The test of the
genuineness of a photograph that is obtained when the unknown relative
of an unknown sitter appears in the background of the photograph, is
immeasurably superior to precautions any expert conjurer or trick
photographer might evade. Again and again I sent friends to Mr. B--,
giving him no information as to who they were, nor telling him anything
as to the identity of the persons' deceased friend or relative whose
portrait they wished to secure; and time and again when the negative was
developed the portrait would appear in the background, or sometimes in
front of the sitter. This occurred so frequently that I am quite
convinced of the impossibility of any fraud. One time it was a French
editor, who finding the portrait of his deceased wife appear on the
negative when developed, was so transported with delight that he
insisted on kissing the photographer, Mr. B--, much to the old man's
embarrassment. On another occasion it was a Lancashire engineer, himself
a photographer, who took marked plates and all possible precautions. He
obtained portraits of two of his relatives and another of an eminent
personage with whom he had been in close relations. Or again, it was a
near neighbor, who, going as a total stranger to the studio, obtained
the portrait of her deceased daughter.

"I attach no importance whatever to the appearance of portraits of
well-known personages, which might easily be copied from existing
pictures, but I attach immense importance to the production of the
spirit photographs of unknown relatives of sitters who are unknown to
the photographer, who receives them solely as a lady or gentleman who is
one of my friends.

"Although, as I have said, I do not attach much importance to
photographs appearing of well-known men, I confess that I was rather
impressed by one of my most recent experiments. I received a message
from a medium in Sheffield, who is unknown to me, saying that Cecil
Rhodes, who had then been dead about nine months, had spoken to her
clairaudiently, and had told her to ask me to go to the photographer's,
and that he would come and be photographed. The medium was a stranger to
me, and I confess that I received the message with considerable
skepticism. However, when she came up to town I accompanied her to the
studio. She declared that she saw Cecil Rhodes, and that he spoke to
her, and that he was standing behind me when the plate was exposed. When
the plate came to be developed, although there was one well-defined
figure standing behind me and several other faces half visible in the
background, there was no portrait of Cecil Rhodes. I was not surprised,
and went away. A month afterwards I went to have another sitting with
the photographer. I chatted with him for a short time, and then he left
the room for a moment. When he came back he said to me: 'There is a
round-faced well set-up man here with a short moustache and a dimple in
his chin. Do you know him?' 'No,' I said, 'I don't know any such man.'
'Well, he seems to be very busy about you.' 'Well,' I said, 'if he comes
upstairs, we shall see what we can get.' 'I don't know,' said he. When I
was sitting, he said, 'There he is, and I see the letter R. Is it Robert
or Richard, do you think?' 'I don't know any Robert or Richard,' I said.
He took the picture. He then proceeded with the second plate, and said,
'That man is still here, and I see behind him a country road. I wonder
what that means.' He went into the dark room, and presently came out and
said, 'I see "road or roads." Do you know any one of that name?' 'Of
course,' I said, 'Cecil Rhodes.' 'Do you mean him as died in the
Transvaal lately?' said he. I said 'Yes.' 'Well,' he said, 'was he a man
like that?' 'Well, he had a moustache,' I said. And sure enough, when
the plate was developed, there was Cecil Rhodes looking fifteen years
younger than when he died.

"Some other plates were exposed. One was entirely blank, on two others
the mist was formed into a kind of clot of light, but no figure was
visible, the fifth had a portrait of an unknown man, and on the sixth,
when it came to be developed, there was the same portrait of Cecil
Rhodes that had appeared on the first, but without the white drapery
round the head.

"Of course it may be said that it was well known that I was connected
with Cecil Rhodes and that the photographer therefore would have no
difficulty in faking a portrait. I admit all that, and therefore I would
not have introduced this if it had stood alone, as any evidence showing
that it was a _bona fide_ photograph of an invisible being. But it does
not stand alone, and I have almost every reason to believe in the almost
stupid honesty, if I may use such a phrase, of the photographer. I am
naturally much interested in these latest portraits of the African
Colossus. They are, at any rate, entirely new, no such portraits, to the
best of my knowledge--and I have made a collection of all I can lay my
hands on--exactly resembling those portraits which I obtained at Mr.
B--'s studio.

"I will conclude the account of my experiments by telling how I secured
a portrait under circumstances which preclude any possibility of fake or
fraud. One day when I entered the studio, Mr. B-- said to me, 'There is
a man come with you who has been here before; he came here some days ago
when I was by myself; he looked very wild, and he had a gun in his hand,
and I did

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