thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain--and compel, not
that which ought properly to be called the Soul, and which is far
beyond human reach, but rather a phantom of what has been most
earth-stained on earth to make itself apparent to our senses--is a very
ancient though obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But
I do not conceive the power to be supernatural. Let me illustrate what I
mean from an experiment which Paracelsus describes as not difficult, and
which the author of the 'Curiosities of Literature' cites as credible: A
flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower
while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never
discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the
burned dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it
seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The soul has as
much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may
make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular
superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be
confounded with the true soul; it is but the _eidolon_ of the dead form.
Hence, like the best attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be the soul; that
is, of superior emancipated intelligence. These apparitions come for
little or no object--they seldom speak when they do come; if they speak,
they utter no ideas above those of an ordinary person on earth.
Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to be
truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is
incumbent on philosophy to deny--viz., nothing supernatural. They are
but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the
means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether, in so doing, tables
walk by their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle,
or bodyless hands rise and remove material objects, or a Thing of
Darkness, such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood--still am I
persuaded that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to
my own brain from the brain of another. In some constitutions there is a
natural chemistry, and those constitutions may produce chemic
wonders--in others a natural fluid, call it electricity, and these may
produce electric wonders. But the wonders differ from Natural Science in
this--they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous. They
lead on to no grand results; and therefore the world does not heed, and
true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I saw or
heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and I believe
unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for this
reason: no two persons, you say, have ever experienced exactly the same
thing. Well, observe, no two persons ever experience exactly the same
dream. If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be
arranged for results that would but little vary; if it were a
supernatural agency permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for
some definite end. These phenomena belong to neither class; my
persuasion is that they originate in some brain now far distant; that
that brain had no distinct volition in anything that occurred; that
what does occur reflects but its devious, motley, ever-shifting,
half-formed thoughts; in short, that it has been but the dreams of such
a brain put in action and invested with a semi-substance. That this
brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into movement, that it
is malignant and destructive, I believe; some material force must have
killed my dog; the same force might, for aught I know, have sufficed to
kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog--had my
intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my
will."
"It killed your dog! that is fearful! indeed it is strange that no
animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and
mice are never found in it."
"The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their
existence. Man's reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a
resisting power more supreme. But enough; do you comprehend my theory?"
"Yes, though imperfectly--and I accept any crotchet (pardon the word),
however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and
hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house
the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house?"
"I will tell you what I would do. I am convinced from my own internal
feelings that the small unfurnished room at right angles to the door of
the bedroom which I occupied forms a starting-point or receptacle for
the influences which haunt the house; and I strongly advise you to have
the walls opened, the floor removed--nay, the whole room pulled down. I
observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the
small back-yard, and could be removed without injury to the rest of the
building."
"And you think, if I did that----"
"You would cut off the telegraph wires. Try it. I am so persuaded that I
am right that I will pay half the expense if you will allow me to direct
the operations."
"Nay, I am well able to afford the cost; for the rest, allow me to write
to you."
About ten days after I received a letter from Mr. J----, telling me that
he had visited the house since I had seen him; that he had found the two
letters I had described, replaced in the drawer from which I had taken
them; that he had read them with misgivings like my own; that he had
instituted a cautious inquiry about the woman to whom I rightly
conjectured they had been written. It seemed that thirty-six years ago
(a year before the date of the letters) she had married, against the
wish of her relations, an American of very suspicious character; in
fact, he was generally believed to have been a pirate. She herself was
the daughter of very respectable tradespeople, and had served in the
capacity of a nursery governess before her marriage. She had a brother,
a widower, who was considered wealthy, and who had one child of about
six years old. A month after the marriage, the body of this brother was
found in the Thames, near London Bridge; there seemed some marks of
violence about his throat, but they were not deemed sufficient to
warrant the inquest in any other verdict than that of "found drowned."
The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased
brother having by his will left his sister the guardianship of his only
child--and in the event of the child's death, the sister inherited. The
child died about six months afterward--it was supposed to have been
neglected and ill-treated. The neighbours deposed to having heard it
shriek at night. The surgeon who had examined it after death said that
it was emaciated as if from want of nourishment, and the body was
covered with livid bruises. It seemed that one winter night the child
had sought to escape--crept out into the back-yard--tried to scale the
wall--fallen back exhausted, and had been found at morning on the stones
in a dying state. But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there
was none of murder; and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate
cruelty by alleging the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the
child, who was declared to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the
orphan's death the aunt inherited her brother's fortune. Before the
first wedded year was out, the American quitted England abruptly, and
never returned to it. He obtained a cruising vessel, which was lost in
the Atlantic two years afterward. The widow was left in affluence; but
reverses of various kinds had befallen her; a bank broke--an investment
failed--she went into a small business and became insolvent--then she
entered into service, sinking lower and lower, from housekeeper down to
maid-of-all-work--never long retaining a place, though nothing decided
against her character was ever alleged. She was considered sober,
honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways; still nothing prospered with
her. And so she had dropped into the workhouse, from which Mr. J---- had
taken her, to be placed in charge of the very house which she had rented
as mistress in the first year of her wedded life.
Mr. J---- added that he had passed an hour alone in the unfurnished room
which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impressions of dread
while there were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen
anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors
removed as I had suggested. He had engaged persons for the work, and
would commence any day I would name.
The day was accordingly fixed. I repaired to the haunted house--we went
into the blind dreary room, took up the skirting, and then the floors.
Under the rafters, covered with rubbish, was found a trap-door, quite
large enough to admit a man. It was closely nailed down, with clamps and
rivets of iron. On removing these we descended into a room below, the
existence of which had never been suspected. In this room there had been
a window and a flue, but they had been bricked over, evidently for many
years. By the help of candles we examined this place; it still retained
some mouldering furniture--three chairs, an oak settle, a table--all of
the fashion of about eighty years ago. There was a chest of drawers
against the wall, in which we found, half-rotted away, old-fashioned
articles of a man's dress, such as might have been worn eighty or a
hundred years ago by a gentleman of some rank--costly steel buttons and
buckles, like those yet worn in court-dresses, a handsome court
sword--in a waistcoat which had once been rich with gold lace, but which
was now blackened and foul with damp, we found five guineas, a few
silver coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some place of
entertainment long since passed away. But our main discovery was in a
kind of iron safe fixed to the wall, the lock of which it cost us much
trouble to get picked.
In this safe were three shelves, and two small drawers. Ranged on the
shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stoppered.
They contained colourless volatile essences, of the nature of which I
shall only say that they were not poisonous--phosphor and ammonia
entered into some of them. There were also some very curious glass
tubes, and a small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock
crystal, and another of amber--also a loadstone of great power.
In one of the drawers we found a miniature portrait set in gold, and
retaining the freshness of its colours most remarkably, considering the
length of time it had probably been there. The portrait was that of a
man who might be somewhat advanced in middle life, perhaps forty-seven
or forty-eight.
It was a remarkable face--a most impressive face. If you could fancy
some mighty serpent transformed into a man, preserving in the human
lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that
countenance than long descriptions can convey; the width and flatness of
frontal--the tapering elegance of contour disguising the strength of the
deadly jaw--the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as the
emerald--and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the
consciousness of an immense power.
Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and
on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a
ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.
Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being
pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid. Withinside the lid
was engraved, "Marianna to thee--Be faithful in life and in death
to ----." Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not
unfamiliar to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as
the name borne by a dazzling charlatan who had made a great sensation in
London for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a
double murder within his own house--that of his mistress and his rival.
I said nothing of this to Mr. J----, to whom reluctantly I resigned the
miniature.
We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron
safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second: it was not
locked, but it resisted all efforts, till we inserted in the chinks the
edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth, we found a very
singular apparatus in the nicest order. Upon a small thin book, or
rather tablet, was placed a saucer of crystal; this saucer was filled
with a clear liquid--on that liquid floated a kind of compass, with a
needle shifting rapidly round; but instead of the usual points of the
compass were seven strange characters, not very unlike those used by
astrologers to denote the planets. A peculiar but not strong nor
displeasing odour came from this drawer, which was lined with a wood
that we afterward discovered to be hazel. Whatever the cause of this
odour, it produced a material effect on the nerves. We all felt it, even
the two workmen who were in the room--a creeping, tingling sensation
from the tips of the fingers to the roots of the hair. Impatient to
examine the tablet, I removed the saucer. As I did so the needle of the
compass went round and round with exceeding swiftness, and I felt a
shock that ran through my whole frame, so that I dropped the saucer on
the floor. The liquid was spilled--the saucer was broken--the compass
rolled to the end of the room--and at that instant the walls shook to
and fro, as if a giant had swayed and rocked them.
The two workmen were so frightened that they ran up the ladder by which
we had descended from the trap-door; but seeing that nothing more
happened, they were easily induced to return.
Meanwhile I had opened the tablet: it was bound in plain red leather,
with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on
that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old
monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus: "On all that
it can reach within these walls--sentient or inanimate, living or
dead--as moves the needle, so work my will! Accursed be the house, and
restless be the dwellers therein."
We found no more. Mr. J---- burned the tablet and its anathema. He razed
to the foundations the part of the building containing the secret room
with the chamber over it. He had then the courage to inhabit the house
himself for a month, and a quieter, better-conditioned house could not
be found in all London. Subsequently he let it to advantage, and his
tenant has made no complaints.
THE ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF
A. T. QUILLER-COUCH
"Yes, sir," said my host, the quarryman, reaching down the relics from
their hook in the wall over the chimneypiece; "they've hung there all my
time, and most of my father's. The women won't touch 'em; they're afraid
of the story. So here they'll dangle, and gather dust and smoke, till
another tenant comes and tosses 'em out o' doors for rubbish. Whew! 'tis
coarse weather, surely."
He went to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat
upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove
past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine
of the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the
relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge. But
the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the threads of its
party-coloured sling, though fretted and dusty, still hung together.
Around the side-drum, beneath its cracked brown varnish, I could hardly
trace a royal coat-of-arms and a legend running, "Per Mare Per
Terram"--the motto of the marines. Its parchment, though black and
scented with woodsmoke, was limp and mildewed; and I began to tighten
up the straps--under which the drumsticks had been loosely thrust--with
the idle purpose of seeing if some music might be got out of the old
drum yet.
But as I turned it on my knee, I found the drum attached to the
trumpet-sling by a curious barrel-shaped padlock, and paused to examine
this. The body of the lock was composed of half a dozen brass rings, set
accurately edge to edge; and, rubbing the brass with my thumb, I saw
that each of the six had a series of letters engraved around it.
I knew the trick of it, I thought. Here was one of those word padlocks,
once so common; only to be opened by getting the rings to spell a
certain word, which the dealer confides to you.
My host shut and barred the door, and came back to the hearth.
"'Twas just such a wind--east by south--that brought in what you've got
between your hands. Back in the year 'nine, it was; my father has told
me the tale a score o' times. You're twisting round the rings, I see.
But you'll never guess the word. Parson Kendall, he made the word, and
he locked down a couple o' ghosts in their graves with it; and when his
time came he went to his own grave and took the word with him."
"Whose ghosts, Matthew?"
"You want the story, I see, sir. My father could tell it better than I
can. He was a young man in the year 'nine, unmarried at the time, and
living in this very cottage, just as I be. That's how he came to get
mixed up with the tale."
He took a chair, lighted a short pipe, and went on, with his eyes fixed
on the dancing violet flames:
"Yes, he'd ha' been about thirty year old in January, eighteen 'nine.
The storm got up in the night o' the twenty-first o' that month. My
father was dressed and out long before daylight; he never was one to
bide in bed, let be that the gale by this time was pretty near lifting
the thatch over his head. Besides which, he'd fenced a small 'taty-patch
that winter, down by Lowland Point, and he wanted to see if it stood the
night's work. He took the path across Gunner's Meadow--where they buried
most of the bodies afterward. The wind was right in his teeth at the
time, and once on the way (he's told me this often) a great strip of
oarweed came flying through the darkness and fetched him a slap on the
cheek like a cold hand. He made shift pretty well till he got to
Lowland, and then had to drop upon hands and knees and crawl, digging
his fingers every now and then into a shingle to hold on, for he
declared to me that the stones, some of them as big as a man's head,
kept rolling and driving past till it seemed the whole foreshore was
moving westward under him. The fence was gone, of course; not a stick
left to show where it stood; so that, when first he came to the place,
he thought he must have missed his bearings. My father, sir, was a very
religious man; and if he reckoned the end of the world was at
hand--there in the great wind and night, among the moving stones--you
may believe he was certain of it when he heard a gun fired, and, with
the same, saw a flame shoot up out of the darkness to windward, making a
sudden fierce light in all the place about. All he could find to think
or say was, 'The Second Coming! The Second Coming! The Bridegroom
cometh, and the wicked He will toss like a ball into a large country';
and being already upon his knees, he just bowed his head and 'bided,
saying this over and over.
"But by'm by, between two squalls, he made bold to lift his head and
look, and then by the light--a bluish colour 'twas--he saw all the coast
clear away to Manacle Point, and off the Manacles in the thick of the
weather, a sloop-of-war with topgallants housed, driving stern foremost
toward the reef. It was she, of course, that was burning the fire. My
father could see the white streak and the ports of her quite plain as
she rose to it, a little outside the breakers, and he guessed easy
enough that her captain had just managed to wear ship and was trying to
force her nose to the sea with the help of her small bower anchor and
the scrap or two of canvas that hadn't yet been blown out of her. But
while he looked, she fell off, giving her broadside to it, foot by foot,
and drifting back on the breakers around Carn Du and the Varses. The
rocks lie so thick thereabout that 'twas a toss up which she struck
first; at any rate, my father couldn't tell at the time, for just then
the flare died down and went out.
"Well, sir, he turned then in the dark and started back for Coverack to
cry the dismal tidings--though well knowing ship and crew to be past any
hope, and as he turned the wind lifted him and tossed him forward 'like
a ball,' as he'd been saying, and homeward along the foreshore. As you
know, 'tis ugly work, even by daylight, picking your way among the
stones there, and my father was prettily knocked about at first in the
dark. But by this 'twas nearer seven than six o'clock, and the day
spreading. By the time he reached North Corner, a man could see to read
print; hows'ever, he looked neither out to sea nor toward Coverack, but
headed straight for the first cottage--the same that stands above North
Corner today. A man named Billy Ede lived there then, and when my father
burst into the kitchen bawling, 'Wreck! wreck!' he saw Billy Ede's wife,
Ann, standing there in her clogs with a shawl over her head, and her
clothes wringing wet.
"'Save the chap!' says Billy Ede's wife, Ann. 'What d'ee mean by crying
stale fish at that rate?'
"'But 'tis a wreck, I tell 'e.'
"'I'v a-zeed'n, too; and so has every one with an eye in his head.'
"And with that she pointed straight over my father's shoulder, and he
turned; and there, close under Dolor Point, at the end of Coverack town
he saw another wreck washing, and the point black with people, like
emmets, running to and fro in the morning light. While he stood staring
at her, he heard a trumpet sounded on board, the notes coming in little
jerks, like a bird rising against the wind; but faintly, of course,
because of the distance and the gale blowing--though this had dropped a
little.
"'She's a transport,' said Billy Ede's wife, Ann, 'and full of
horse-soldiers, fine long men. When she struck they must ha' pitched the
horses over first to lighten the ship, for a score of dead horses had
washed in afore I left, half an hour back. An' three or four soldiers,
too--fine long corpses in white breeches and jackets of blue and gold. I
held the lantern to one. Such a straight young man.'
"My father asked her about the trumpeting.
"'That's the queerest bit of all. She was burnin' a light when me an' my
man joined the crowd down there. All her masts had gone; whether they
carried away, or were cut away to ease her, I don't rightly know. Her
keelson was broke under her and her bottom sagged and stove, and she had
just settled down like a setting hen--just the leastest list to
starboard; but a man could stand there easy. They had rigged up ropes
across her, from bulwark to bulwark, an' beside these the men were
mustered, holding on like grim death whenever the sea made a clean
breach over them, an' standing up like heroes as soon as it passed. The
captain an' the officers were clinging to the rail of the quarter-deck,
all in their golden uniforms, waiting for the end as if 'twas King
George they expected. There was no way to help, for she lay right beyond
cast of line, though our folk tried it fifty times. And beside them
clung a trumpeter, a whacking big man, an' between the heavy seas he
would lift his trumpet with one hand, and blow a call; and every time he
blew the men gave a cheer. There (she says)--hark 'ee now--there he goes
agen! But you won't hear no cheering any more, for few are left to
cheer, and their voices weak. Bitter cold the wind is, and I reckon it
numbs their grip o' the ropes, for they were dropping off fast with
every sea when my man sent me home to get his breakfast. Another wreck,
you say? Well, there's no hope for the tender dears, if 'tis the
Manacles. You'd better run down and help yonder; though 'tis little help
any man can give. Not one came in alive while I was there. The tide's
flowing, an' she won't hold together another hour, they say.'
"Well, sure enough, the end was coming fast when my father got down to
the Point. Six men had been cast up alive, or just breathing--a seaman
and five troopers. The seaman was the only one that had breath to speak;
and while they were carrying him into the town, the word went round that
the ship's name was the 'Despatch,' transport, homeward bound from
Corunna, with a detachment of the Seventh Hussars, that had been
fighting out there with Sir John Moore. The seas had rolled her further
over by this time, and given her decks a pretty sharp slope; but a dozen
men still held on, seven by the ropes near the ship's waist, a couple
near the break of the poop, and three on the quarter-deck. Of these
three my father made out one to be the skipper; close to him clung an
officer in full regimentals--his name, they heard after, was Captain
Duncanfield; and last came the tall trumpeter; and if you'll believe me,
the fellow was making shift there, at the very last, to blow 'God Save
the King.' What's more, he got to 'Send us victorious,' before an extra
big sea came bursting across and washed them off the deck--every man but
one of the pair beneath the poop--and he dropped his hold before the
next wave; being stunned, I reckon. The others went out of sight at
once, but the trumpeter--being, as I said, a powerful man as well as a
tough swimmer--rose like a duck, rode out a couple of breakers, and came
in on the crest of the third. The folks looked to see him broke like an
egg at their very feet; but when the smother cleared, there he was,
lying face downward on a ledge below them; and one of the men that
happened to have a rope round him--I forget the fellow's name, if I ever
heard it--jumped down and grabbed him by the ankle as he began to slip
back. Before the next big sea, the pair were hauled high enough to be
out of harm, and another heave brought them up to grass. Quick work, but
master trumpeter wasn't quite dead; nothing worse than a cracked head
and three staved ribs. In twenty minutes or so they had him in bed, with
the doctor to tend him.
"Now was the time--nothing being left alive upon the transport--for my
father to tell of the sloop he'd seen driving upon the Manacles. And
when he got a hearing, though the most were set upon salvage, and
believed a wreck in the hand, so to say, to be worth half a dozen they
couldn't see, a good few volunteered to start off with him and have a
look. They crossed Lowland Point; no ship to be seen on the Manacles nor
anywhere upon the sea. One or two was for calling my father a liar.
'Wait till we come to Dean Point,' said he. Sure enough, on the far side
of Dean Point they found the sloop's mainmast washing about with half a
dozen men lashed to it, men in red jackets, every mother's son drowned
and staring; and a little further on, just under the Dean, three or four
bodies cast up on the shore, one of them a small drummer-boy, side-drum
and all; and nearby part of a ship's gig, with 'H.M.S. Primrose' cut on
the sternboard. From this point on the shore was littered thick with
wreckage and dead bodies--the most of them marines in uniform--and in
Godrevy Cove, in particular, a heap of furniture from the captain's
cabin, and among it a water-tight box, not much damaged, and full of
papers, by which, when it came to be examined, next day, the wreck was
easily made out to be the 'Primrose' of eighteen guns, outward bound
from Portsmouth, with a fleet of transports for the Spanish war--thirty
sail, I've heard, but I've never heard what became of them. Being
handled by merchant skippers, no doubt they rode out the gale, and
reached the Tagus safe and sound. Not but what the captain of the
'Primrose'--Mein was his name--did quite right to try and club-haul his
vessel when he found himself under the land; only he never ought to have
got there, if he took proper soundings. But it's easy talking.