The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very
vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time,
in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and
Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name.
There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a
modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday
morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight--which indeed
gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was
invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness
when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we
naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying--of
that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began,
it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought
was only the incurable artifice of the man.
“I say!” he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of
sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, “you know I was alone
here last night?”
“Except for the domestics,” said Wish.
“Who sleep in the other wing,” said Clayton. “Yes. Well--” He pulled at
his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about his
confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, “I caught a ghost!”
“Caught a ghost, did you?” said Sanderson. “Where is it?”
And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, “CAUGHT a ghost, did you, Clayton? I'm glad of it!
Tell us all about it right now.”
Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.
He looked apologetically at me. “There's no eavesdropping of course, but
we don't want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of
ghosts in the place. There's too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle
with that. And this, you know, wasn't a regular ghost. I don't think it
will come again--ever.”
“You mean to say you didn't keep it?” said Sanderson.
“I hadn't the heart to,” said Clayton.
And Sanderson said he was surprised.
We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. “I know,” he said, with the
flicker of a smile, “but the fact is it really WAS a ghost, and I'm as
sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I'm not joking. I mean
what I say.”
Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and
then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.
Clayton ignored the comment. “It is the strangest thing that has ever
happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or anything of
the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one in a corner; and
the whole business is in my hands.”
He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce a
second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.
“You talked to it?” asked Wish.
“For the space, probably, of an hour.”
“Chatty?” I said, joining the party of the sceptics.
“The poor devil was in trouble,” said Clayton, bowed over his cigar-end
and with the very faintest note of reproof.
“Sobbing?” some one asked.
Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. “Good Lord!” he said;
“yes.” And then, “Poor fellow! yes.”
“Where did you strike it?” asked Evans, in his best American accent.
“I never realised,” said Clayton, ignoring him, “the poor sort of thing
a ghost might be,” and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought
for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.
“I took an advantage,” he reflected at last.
We were none of us in a hurry. “A character,” he said, “remains just the
same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too
often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may
have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose--most haunting
ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and as obstinate
as mules to come back again and again. This poor creature wasn't.” He
suddenly looked up rather queerly, and his eye went round the room. “I
say it,” he said, “in all kindliness, but that is the plain truth of the
case. Even at the first glance he struck me as weak.”
He punctuated with the help of his cigar.
“I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards
me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was
transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer
of the little window at the end. And not only his physique but his
attitude struck me as being weak. He looked, you know, as though he
didn't know in the slightest whatever he meant to do. One hand was on
the panelling and the other fluttered to his mouth. Like--SO!”
“What sort of physique?” said Sanderson.
“Lean. You know that sort of young man's neck that has two great
flutings down the back, here and here--so! And a little, meanish head
with scrubby hair--And rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the
hips; turn-down collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a
little frayed at the heels. That's how he took me. I came very quietly
up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know--the candles are on
the landing table and there is that lamp--and I was in my list slippers,
and I saw him as I came up. I stopped dead at that--taking him in. I
wasn't a bit afraid. I think that in most of these affairs one is
never nearly so afraid or excited as one imagines one would be. I was
surprised and interested. I thought, 'Good Lord! Here's a ghost at
last! And I haven't believed for a moment in ghosts during the last
five-and-twenty years.'”
“Um,” said Wish.
“I suppose I wasn't on the landing a moment before he found out I was
there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature young
man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin. So for an
instant we stood--he looking over his shoulder at me and regarded one
another. Then he seemed to remember his high calling. He turned round,
drew himself up, projected his face, raised his arms, spread his hands
in approved ghost fashion--came towards me. As he did so his little jaw
dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out 'Boo.' No, it wasn't--not a
bit dreadful. I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all
alone, perhaps two or three--perhaps even four or five--whiskies, so I
was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been assailed
by a frog. 'Boo!' I said. 'Nonsense. You don't belong to THIS place.
What are you doing here?'
“I could see him wince. 'Boo-oo,' he said.
“'Boo--be hanged! Are you a member?' I said; and just to show I didn't
care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light
my candle. 'Are you a member?' I repeated, looking at him sideways.
“He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became
crestfallen. 'No,' he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of
my eye; 'I'm not a member--I'm a ghost.'
“'Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there any
one you want to see, or anything of that sort?' and doing it as steadily
as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness of whisky
for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned on him,
holding it. 'What are you doing here?' I said.
“He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood,
abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man. 'I'm
haunting,' he said.
“'You haven't any business to,' I said in a quiet voice.
“'I'm a ghost,' he said, as if in defence.
“'That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This is a
respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids and
children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor little
mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits. I suppose
you didn't think of that?'
“'No, sir,' he said, 'I didn't.'
“'You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have you?
Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'
“'None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled--'
“'That's NO excuse.' I regarded him firmly. 'Your coming here is a
mistake,' I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see
if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly. 'If I were you I
wouldn't wait for cock-crow--I'd vanish right away.'
“He looked embarrassed. 'The fact IS, sir--' he began.
“'I'd vanish,' I said, driving it home.
“'The fact is, sir, that--somehow--I can't.'
“'You CAN'T?'
“'No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging about
here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty
bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come haunting
before, and it seems to put me out.'
“'Put you out?'
“'Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't come off.
There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get back.'
“That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an
abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the high,
hectoring vein I had adopted. 'That's queer,' I said, and as I spoke I
fancied I heard some one moving about down below. 'Come into my room and
tell me more about it,' I said. 'I didn't, of course, understand this,'
and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course, you might as well
have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my number,
I think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms--it was lucky I
was the only soul in that wing--until I saw my traps. 'Here we are,' I
said, and sat down in the arm-chair; 'sit down and tell me all about it.
It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward position, old
chap.'
“Well, he said he wouldn't sit down! he'd prefer to flit up and down the
room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little
while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you know,
something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me, and I began
to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird business it was
that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent--the proper conventional
phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of a voice--flitting to
and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old bedroom. You could see
the gleam of the copper candlesticks through him, and the lights on the
brass fender, and the corners of the framed engravings on the wall,--and
there he was telling me all about this wretched little life of his that
had recently ended on earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you
know, but being transparent, of course, he couldn't avoid telling the
truth.”
“Eh?” said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.
“What?” said Clayton.
“Being transparent--couldn't avoid telling the truth--I don't see it,”
said Wish.
“_I_ don't see it,” said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. “But it IS
so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's
breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed--he
went down into a London basement with a candle to look for a leakage
of gas--and described himself as a senior English master in a London
private school when that release occurred.”
“Poor wretch!” said I.
“That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked
of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been
anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too
nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he
said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had never
had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations. 'It's
like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the
examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.' Engaged to be
married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I suppose--when the
indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. 'And where are you
now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'
“He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was
of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls too
non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue. _I_ don't
know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give me any clear
idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the Other Side
of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in with a set of
kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men, who were on a footing
of Christian names, and among these there was certainly a lot of talk
about 'going haunting' and things like that. Yes--going haunting! They
seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous adventure, and most of them
funked it all the time. And so primed, you know, he had come.”
“But really!” said Wish to the fire.
“These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow,” said Clayton, modestly.
“I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was
the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down,
with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched self, and
never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner
and sillier and more pointless than if he had been real and alive. Only
then, you know, he would not have been in my bedroom here--if he HAD
been alive. I should have kicked him out.”
“Of course,” said Evans, “there ARE poor mortals like that.”
“And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of
us,” I admitted.
“What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did
seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of
haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be
a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was,
nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself
an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that
he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a
perfect mess of--and through all the wastes of eternity he never
would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps--. He paused at that, and stood
regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody,
not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now.
I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him
off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend,
the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings,
ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't
you brood on these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do
is to get out of this get out of this--sharp. You pull yourself together
and TRY.' 'I can't,' he said. 'You try,' I said, and try he did.”
“Try!” said Sanderson. “HOW?”
“Passes,” said Clayton.
“Passes?”
“Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how
he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a
business I had!”
“But how could ANY series of passes--?” I began.
“My dear man,” said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis
on certain words, “you want EVERYTHING clear. _I_ don't know HOW. All
I know is that you DO--that HE did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful
time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared.”
“Did you,” said Sanderson, slowly, “observe the passes?”
“Yes,” said Clayton, and seemed to think. “It was tremendously queer,”
he said. “There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent
room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night
town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made when
he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the
dressing-table alight, that was all--sometimes one or other would flare
up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a space. And queer things
happened. 'I can't,' he said; 'I shall never--!' And suddenly he sat
down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.
Lord! what a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!
“'You pull yourself together,' I said, and tried to pat him on the back,
and... my confounded hand went through him! By that time, you know,
I wasn't nearly so--massive as I had been on the landing. I got the
queerness of it full. I remember snatching back my hand out of him, as
it were, with a little thrill, and walking over to the dressing-table.
'You pull yourself together,' I said to him, 'and try.' And in order to
encourage and help him I began to try as well.”
“What!” said Sanderson, “the passes?”
“Yes, the passes.”
“But--” I said, moved by an idea that eluded me for a space.
“This is interesting,” said Sanderson, with his finger in his pipe-bowl.
“You mean to say this ghost of yours gave away--”
“Did his level best to give away the whole confounded barrier? YES.”
“He didn't,” said Wish; “he couldn't. Or you'd have gone there too.”
“That's precisely it,” I said, finding my elusive idea put into words
for me.
“That IS precisely it,” said Clayton, with thoughtful eyes upon the
fire.
For just a little while there was silence.
“And at last he did it?” said Sanderson.
“At last he did it. I had to keep him up to it hard, but he did it at
last--rather suddenly. He despaired, we had a scene, and then he got up
abruptly and asked me to go through the whole performance, slowly, so
that he might see. 'I believe,' he said, 'if I could SEE I should spot
what was wrong at once.' And he did. '_I_ know,' he said. 'What do you
know?' said I. '_I_ know,' he repeated. Then he said, peevishly, 'I
CAN'T do it if you look at me--I really CAN'T; it's been that, partly,
all along. I'm such a nervous fellow that you put me out.' Well, we had
a bit of an argument. Naturally I wanted to see; but he was as obstinate
as a mule, and suddenly I had come over as tired as a dog--he tired me
out. 'All right,' I said, '_I_ won't look at you,' and turned towards
the mirror, on the wardrobe, by the bed.
“He started off very fast. I tried to follow him by looking in the
looking-glass, to see just what it was had hung. Round went his arms
and his hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush came to the last
gesture of all--you stand erect and open out your arms--and so, don't
you know, he stood. And then he didn't! He didn't! He wasn't! I wheeled
round from the looking-glass to him. There was nothing, I was alone,
with the flaring candles and a staggering mind. What had happened? Had
anything happened? Had I been dreaming?... And then, with an absurd note
of finality about it, the clock upon the landing discovered the moment
was ripe for striking ONE. So!--Ping! And I was as grave and sober as
a judge, with all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast serene.
Feeling queer, you know--confoundedly QUEER! Queer! Good Lord!”
He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. “That's all that happened,” he
said.
“And then you went to bed?” asked Evans.
“What else was there to do?”
I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton's voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.
“And about these passes?” said Sanderson.
“I believe I could do them now.”
“Oh!” said Sanderson, and produced a penknife and set himself to grub
the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.
“Why don't you do them now?” said Sanderson, shutting his pen-knife with
a click.
“That's what I'm going to do,” said Clayton.
“They won't work,” said Evans.
“If they do--” I suggested.
“You know, I'd rather you didn't,” said Wish, stretching out his legs.
“Why?” asked Evans.
“I'd rather he didn't,” said Wish.
“But he hasn't got 'em right,” said Sanderson, plugging too much tobacco
in his pipe.
“All the same, I'd rather he didn't,” said Wish.
We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through those
gestures was like mocking a serious matter. “But you don't believe--?”
I said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the fire, weighing
something in his mind. “I do--more than half, anyhow, I do,” said Wish.
“Clayton,” said I, “you're too good a liar for us. Most of it was all
right. But that disappearance... happened to be convincing. Tell us,
it's a tale of cock and bull.”
He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and
faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for
all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an
intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his
eyes and so began....
Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. “That's not bad,” he
said, when it was done. “You really do, you know, put things together,
Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out.”
“I know,” said Clayton. “I believe I could tell you which.”
“Well?”
“This,” said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and
thrust of the hands.
“Yes.”
“That, you know, was what HE couldn't get right,” said Clayton. “But how
do YOU--?”
“Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't
understand at all,” said Sanderson, “but just that phase--I do.” He
reflected. “These happen to be a series of gestures--connected with a
certain branch of esoteric Masonry. Probably you know. Or else--HOW?” He
reflected still further. “I do not see I can do any harm in telling you
just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you don't,
you don't.”
“I know nothing,” said Clayton, “except what the poor devil let out last
night.”
“Well, anyhow,” said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very
carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he
gesticulated with his hands.
“So?” said Clayton, repeating.
“So,” said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.
“Ah, NOW,” said Clayton, “I can do the whole thing--right.”
He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think
there was just a little hesitation in his smile. “If I begin--” he said.
“I wouldn't begin,” said Wish.
“It's all right!” said Evans. “Matter is indestructible. You don't think
any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the
world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I'm concerned,
until your arms drop off at the wrists.”
“I don't believe that,” said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on
Clayton's shoulder. “You've made me half believe in that story somehow,
and I don't want to see the thing done!”
“Goodness!” said I, “here's Wish frightened!”
“I am,” said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. “I believe
that if he goes through these motions right he'll GO.”
“He'll not do anything of the sort,” I cried. “There's only one way out
of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that. Besides...
And such a ghost! Do you think--?”
Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and
stopped beside the tole and stood there. “Clayton,” he said, “you're a
fool.”
Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. “Wish,”
he said, “is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall get
to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through the
air, Presto!--this hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank
amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will
plump into the world of shades. I'm certain. So will you be. I decline
to argue further. Let the thing be tried.”
“NO,” said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his
hands once more to repeat the spirit's passing.
By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension--largely
because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on
Clayton--I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as
though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had
been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably
serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before us.
As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one's teeth. The
last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide open, with the
face held up. And when at last he swung out to this closing gesture I
ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that
ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer, old shadowy house.
Would he, after all--?
There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his
upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp. We
hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from all
of us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half a
reassuring “NO!” For visibly--he wasn't going. It was all nonsense. He
had told an idle story, and carried it almost to conviction, that was
all!... And then in that moment the face of Clayton, changed.
It changed. It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are
suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed, his
smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood there,
very gently swaying.
That moment, too, was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping,
things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give,
and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms....
It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing.
We believed it, yet could not believe it.... I came out of a muddled
stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt
were torn open, and Sanderson's hand lay on his heart....
Well--the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience;
there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it
lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton
had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from
our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man
may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's
incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the
midst of an idle tale--as the coroner's jury would have us believe--is
no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles
that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall
come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very
instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell
down before us--dead!