I
WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent
dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s--the
narrative of a strange personal visitation.
Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal
fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a
good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand
being, after Murchard’s brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to
us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a
contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner
more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised
us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural
impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil
Frenham--whose story was the slightest of the lot--had the habit of
sending our souls into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had
every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would
have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.
Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his arm-chair,
listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful
tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be
favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy,
without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by
education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit
of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between
physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially
a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety
show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into
the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one
knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”
Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having,
at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel;
but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his
character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming
little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution
of his dry thwarted physiognomy.
“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,”
Murchard had once said of him. “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” some
one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description
of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like
mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had
nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His
carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine
intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the
disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky.
Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised
his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race
seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous,
and women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking. On the
importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy
was the only science which he revered as dogma. It must be owned that
his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view,
besides being a reason--though not the main one--for the fidelity of his
friends.
Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less
stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place for
the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and draughty, but light, spacious
and orderly--a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves had
fallen. In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our
muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible
the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two
neophytes were now and then added to our band.
Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these
recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion
that our old friend “liked ‘em juicy.” It was indeed a fact that Culwin,
for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in
youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of
soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a
disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea
to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for
experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of
his nature was like the pure paste under a delicate glaze. Culwin had
fished him out of a thick fog of family dulness, and pulled him up to
a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn’t hurt him a bit. Indeed,
the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities
without robbing them of their young bloom of awe seemed to me a
sufficient answer to Murchard’s ogreish metaphor. There was nothing
hectic in Frenham’s efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even
a finger-tip on the sacred stupidities. One wanted no better proof of
that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.
“There’s a side of him you fellows don’t see. _I_ believe that story
about the duel!” he declared; and it was of the very essence of
this belief that it should impel him--just as our little party was
dispersing--to turn back to our host with the absurd demand: “And now
you’ve got to tell us about _your_ ghost!”
The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham and I
remained; and the vigilant servant who presided over Culwin’s destinies,
having brought a fresh supply of soda-water, had been laconically
ordered to bed.
Culwin’s sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that he
expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight.
But Frenham’s appeal seemed to disconcert him comically, and he rose
from the chair in which he had just reseated himself after his farewells
in the hall.
“_My_ ghost? Do you suppose I’m fool enough to go to the expense of
keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my
friends’ closets?--Take another cigar,” he said, revolving toward me
with a laugh.
Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the
chimney-piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.
“Oh,” he said, “you’d never be content to share if you met one you
really liked.”
Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded in
its habitual hollow, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar.
“Liked--_liked?_ Good Lord!” he growled.
“Ah, you _have_, then!” Frenham pounced on him in the same instant, with
a sidewise glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered gnomelike among
his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke.
“What’s the use of denying it? You’ve seen everything, so of course
you’ve seen a ghost!” his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly
into the cloud. “Or, if you haven’t seen one, it’s only because you’ve
seen two!”
The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host. He shot his head
out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and
blinked approvingly at Frenham.
“Yes,” he suddenly flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; “it’s only
because I’ve seen two!”
The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a
fathomless silence, while we continued to stare at each other over
Culwin’s head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts. At length Frenham,
without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of the
hearth, and leaned forward with his listening smile ...