[Illustration: Decorative I]
t is with very deep regret that I find myself unable to keep the promise
made to you last spring to provide you with a suitable ghost story for
your Christmas number. I have made several efforts to prepare such a
tale as it seemed to me you would require, but, one and all, these have
proved unavailing. By a singular and annoying combination of
circumstances in which only my unfortunate habit of meeting trouble in a
spirit of badinage has involved me, I cannot secure the models which I
invariably need for the realistic presentation of my stories, and I
decline at this present, as I have hitherto consistently declined, to
draw upon my imagination for the ingredients necessary, even though
tempted by the exigencies of a contract sealed, signed, and delivered.
It is far from my wish to be known to you as one who makes promises only
to break them, but there are times in a man's life when he must consider
seriously which is the lesser evil, to deceive the individual or to
deceive the world, the latter being a mass of individuals, and,
consequently, as much more worthy of respect as the whole is greater
than a part. Could I bring myself to be false to my principles as a
scribe, and draw upon my fancy for my facts, and, through a prostitution
of my art, so sickly o'er my plot with the pale cast of realism as to
hoodwink my readers into believing what I know to be false, the task
were easy. Given a more or less active and unrestrained imagination,
pen, ink, paper, and the will to do so, to construct out of these a
ghost story which might have been, but as a matter of fact was not,
presents no difficulties whatsoever; but I unfortunately have a
conscience which, awkward as it is to me at times, I intend to keep
clear and unspotted. The consciousness of having lied would forever rest
as a blot upon my escutcheon. I cannot manufacture out of whole cloth a
narrative such as you desire and be true to myself, and this I intend to
be, even if by so doing I must seem false to you. I think, however,
that, as one of my friends and most important consumer, you are entitled
to a complete explanation of my failure to do as I have told you I
would. To most others I should send merely a curt note evidencing, not
pleading, a pressure of other work as the cause of my not coming to
time. To you it is owed that I should enter somewhat into the details of
the unfortunate business.
You doubtless remember that last summer, with our mutual friend Peters,
I travelled abroad seeking health and, incidentally, ideas. I had
discovered that imported ideas were on the whole rather more popular in
America than those which might be said to be indigenous to the soil. The
reading public had, for the time being at least, given itself over to
moats and chateaux and bloodshed and the curious dialects of the lower
orders of British society. Sherlock Holmes had superseded Old Sleuth in
the affections of my countrymen who read books. Even those honest little
critics the boys and girls were finding more to delight them in the
doings of Richard Coeur de Lion and Alice in Wonderland than in the
more remarkable and intensely American adventures of Ragged Dick or
Mickie the Motorboy. John Storm was at that moment hanging over the
world like the sword of Damocles, and Rudolf Rassendyll had completely
overshadowed such essentially American heroes as Uncle Tom and Rollo. I
found, to my chagrin, that the poetry of Tennyson was more widely read
even than my own, even though Tennyson was dead and I was not. And in
the universities whole terms were devoted to the compulsory study of
dramatists like Shakespeare and Moliere, while home talent, as
represented by Mr. Hoyt or the facile productions of Messrs. Weber &
Fields, was relegated to the limbo of electives which the students might
take up or not, as they chose, and then only in the hours which they
were expected to devote to recreation. All of which seemed to indicate
that while there was of course no royal road to literary fame, there was
with equal certainty no republican path thereto, and that real
inspiration was to be derived rather under the effete monarchies of
Europe than at home. To Peters the same idea had occurred, but in his
case in relation to art rather than to literature. The patrons of art in
America had a marked preference for the works of Meissonier, Corot,
Gerome, Millet--anybody, so long as he was a foreigner, Peters said. The
wealthy would pay ten, twenty, a hundred thousand dollars for a Rousseau
or a Rosa Bonheur rather than exchange a paltry one hundred dollars for
a canvas by Peters, though, as far as Peters was concerned, his canvas
was just as well woven, his pigments as carefully mixed, and his
application of the one to the other as technically correct as was
anything from the foreign brushes.
"You can't take in the full import of a Turner unless you stand a way
away from it," said he, "and if you'll only stand far enough away from
mine you couldn't tell it from a Meissonier."
[Illustration: "I THOUGHT A MILE WAS THE PROPER DISTANCE"]
And when I jocularly responded to this that I thought a mile was the
proper distance, he was offended. We quarrelled, but made up after a
while, and in the making up decided upon a little venture into foreign
fields together, not only to recuperate, but to see if so be we could
discover just where the workers on the other side got that quality which
placed them in popular esteem so far ahead of ourselves.
What we discovered along this especial line must form the burden of
another story. The main cause of our foreign trip, these discoveries,
are but incidental to the theme I have in hand. Our conclusions were
important, but they have no place here, and what they were you will have
to wait until my work on _Abroad versus Home_ is completed to learn. But
what is important to this explanation is the fact that while going
through the long passage leading from the Pitti Palace to the Uffizi
Gallery at Florence we--or rather I--encountered one of those phantoms
which have been among the chief joys and troubles of my life. Peters was
too much taken up with his Baedeker to see either ghosts or pictures.
Indeed, it used to irritate me that Peters saw so little, but he would
do as most American tourists do, and spend all of his time looking for
some especial thing he thought he ought to see, and generally missing
not only it, but thousands of minor things quite as well worthy of his
attention. I don't believe he would have seen the ghost, however, under
any circumstances. It requires a specially cultivated eye or digestion,
one or the other, to enable one to see ghosts, and Peters's eye is blind
to the invisible and his digestion is good.
Why, under the canopy, the vulgar little spectre was haunting a
picture-gallery I never knew, unless it was to embarrass the Americans
who passed to and fro, for he claimed to be an American spook. I knew he
was not a living thing the minute I laid eyes through him. He loomed up
before me while I was engaged in chuckling over a particularly bad
canvas by somebody whose name I have forgotten, but which was something
like Beppo di Contarini. It represented the scene of a grand fete at
Venice back in the fifteenth century, and while preserved by the
art-lovers of Florence as something worthy, would, I firmly believe,
have failed of acceptance even by the catholic taste of the editor of an
American Sunday newspaper comic supplement. The thing was crude in its
drawing, impossible in its coloring, and absolutely devoid of action.
Every gondola on the canal looked as if it were stuck in the mud, and as
for the water of the Grand Canal itself, it had all the liquid glory
under this artist's touch of calf's-foot jelly, and it amused me
intensely to think that these patrons of art, in the most artistic city
in the world, should have deemed it worth keeping. However, whatever the
merit of the painting, I was annoyed in the midst of my contemplation of
it to have thrust into the line of vision a shape--I cannot call it a
body because there was no body to it. There were the lineaments of a
living person, and a very vulgar living person at that, but the thing
was translucent, and as it stepped in between me and the wonderful
specimen of Beppo di Somethingorother's art I felt as if a sudden haze
had swept over my eyes, blurring the picture until it reminded me of a
cheap kind of decalcomania that in my boyhood days had satisfied my
yearnings after the truly beautiful.
I made several ineffectual passes with my hands to brush the thing away.
I had discovered that with certain classes of ghosts one could be rid
of them, just as one may dissipate a cloud of smoke, by swirling one's
outstretched paw around in it, and I hoped that I might in this way rid
myself of the nuisance now before me. But I was mistaken. He swirled,
but failed to dissipate.
"Hum!" said I, straightening up, and addressing the thing with some
degree of irritation. "You may know a great deal about art, my friend,
but you seem not to have studied manners. Get out of my way."
"Pah!" he ejaculated, turning a particularly nasty pair of green eyes on
me. "Who the deuce are you, that you should give me orders?"
"Well," said I, "if I were impulsive of speech and seldom grammatical, I
might reply by saying Me, but as a purist, let me tell you, sir, that
I'm I, and if you seek to know further and more intimately, I will add
that who I am is none of your infernal business."
"Humph!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Grammatical or otherwise,
you're a coward! You don't dare say who you are, because you are afraid
of me. You know I am a spectre, and, like all commonplace people, you
are afraid of ghosts."
A hot retort was on my lips, and I was about to tell him my name and
address, when it occurred to me that by doing so I might lay myself open
to a kind of persecution from which I have suffered from time to time,
ghosts are sometimes so hard to lay, so I accomplished what I at the
moment thought was my purpose by a bluff.
"Oh, as for that," said I, "my name is So and So, and I live at Number
This, That Street, Chicago, Illinois."
Both the name and the address were of course fictitious.
"Very well," said he, calmly, making a note of the address. "My name is
Jones. I am the president of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks,
enjoying a well-earned rest from his labors on his savings from his
salary as a walking delegate. You shall hear from me on your return to
Chicago through the local chapter, the United Apparitions of Illinois."
"All right," said I, with equal calmness. "If the Illinois spooks are as
Illinoisome as you are, I will summon the board of health and have them
laid without more ado."
[Illustration: "HE VANISHED IN SOMETHING OF A RAGE"]
Upon this we parted. That is to say, I walked on to the Uffizi, and he
vanished, in something of a rage, it seemed to me.
I thought no more of the matter until a week ago, when, in accordance
with an agreement with the principal thereof, I left New York to go to
Chicago, to give a talk before a certain young ladies' boarding-school,
on the subject of "Muscular Romanticism." This was a lecture I had
prepared on a literary topic concerning which I had thought much. I had
observed that a great deal of the popularity of certain authors had come
from the admiration of young girls--mostly those at boarding-school, and
therefore deprived of real manly company--for a kind of literature
which, seeming to be manly, did not yet appeal very strongly to men. In
certain aspects it seemed strong. It presented heroes who were truly
heroic, and who always did the right thing in the right manner. Writers
who had more ink than blood to shed, and a greater knowledge of
etiquette than of human nature, were making their way into temporary
fame by compelling chaps to do things they could not do. I rather like
to read of these fellows myself. I am no exception to the rule which
makes human beings admire, and very strongly, too, the fellow who poses
successfully. Indeed, I admire a _poseur_ who can carry his pose through
without disaster to himself, because he has nothing to back him up, and,
wanting this, if by his assurance he can make himself a considerable
personage he falls short of genius only by lacking it. But this is apart
from the story. Whatever the general line of thought in the lecture, I
was, as I have said, on my way to Chicago to deliver it before a young
ladies' boarding-school. I should have been happy over the prospect, for
I have many warm friends in Chicago, there was a moderately large fee
ahead, and there is always a charm, as well, in the mere act of standing
on a dais before some two or three hundred young girls and having their
undivided attention for a brief hour. Yet, despite all this, I was
dreadfully depressed. Why, I could not at first surmise. It seemed to
me, however, as though some horrid disaster were impending. I
experienced all the sensations which make four o'clock in the morning so
dreaded an hour to those who suffer from insomnia. My heart would race
ahead, thumping like the screw of an ocean greyhound, and then slow down
until it seemingly ceased to beat altogether; my hands were alternately
dry and hot, and clammy and cold; and then like a flash I knew why, and
what it was I feared. It suddenly dawned upon my mind that, by some
frightfully unhappy coincidence, the address of Miss Brockton's Academy
for Young Ladies, whither I was bound, was precisely the same as that I
had given the vulgar little spook at Florence as my own. I had entirely
forgotten the incident; and then, as I drew near to the spot whereon I
was to have been made to suffer through the machinations of the local
chapter of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, my soul was filled
with dread. Had Grand-Master-Spook Jones's threat been merely idle? Had
he, even as I had done, dismissed the whole affair as unworthy of any
further care, or would he keep his word?--indeed, had he kept his word,
and, through his followers in the Amalgamated Brotherhood, made himself
obnoxious to the residents of Number This, That Street?
[Illustration: THE SPECTRE BRASS-BAND]
My nervous dread redoubled as I neared Chicago, and it was as much as I
could do, when the train reached Kalamazoo, to keep from turning back.
And the event showed that I suffered with only too much reason, for, on
my arrival at the home of the institution, I found it closed. The door
was locked, the shades pulled down, the building the perfect picture of
gloom. Miss Brockton, I was informed, was in a lunatic-asylum, and two
hundred and eighty-three young girls, ranging from fourteen to twenty
years of age, had been returned to their parents, the hair of every
mother's daughter of them blanched white as the driven snow. No one
knew, my informant said, exactly what had occurred at the academy, but
the fact that was plain to all was that, some two weeks previous to my
coming, the school had retired at the usual hour one night, in the very
zenith of a happy prosperity, and gathered at breakfast the next morning
to find itself wrecked, and bearing the outward semblance of a home for
indigent old ladies. No one, from Miss Brockton herself to the youngest
pupil, could give a coherent account of what had turned them all gray in
a single night, and brought the furrows of age to cheeks both old and
young, nor could any inducement be held out to any of the pupils to pass
another night within those walls. They one and all fled madly back to
their homes, and Miss Brockton's attempted explanation was so incredible
that, protesting her sanity, she was nevertheless placed under
restraint, pending a full investigation of the incident. She had, I was
informed, asserted that some sixty ghosts of most terrible aspect had
paraded through the house between the hours of midnight and 2 A.M.,
howling and shrieking and threatening the occupants in a most terrifying
fashion. At their head marched a spectre brass-band of twenty-four
pieces, grinding out with horrid contortions and grimaces the most awful
discords imaginable--discords, indeed, Miss Brockton had said, alongside
of which those of the most grossly material German street band in
creation became melodies of soothing sweetness. The spectre rabble to
the rear bore transparencies, upon which were painted such legends as,
"Hail to Jones, our beloved Chief!" "Strike One, Strike All!" and, "Down
with Hawkins, the Grinder of Ghosts!" This last caused my heart to sink
still lower, for Hawkins was the name I had given the vision at
Florence, and I now understood all. It was only too manifest that I was
the cause of the undoing of these innocents.
My lie to Jones had brought this disaster upon the Brockton Academy. The
dreadfulness of it appalled me, and I turned away, sick at heart, only
to find myself face to face with the horrid Jones, grinning like the cad
he had proved himself.
"Well, you have done it," I cried, trembling with rage. "I hope you are
proud of yourself, venting your spite on an innocent woman and two
hundred and eighty-three defenceless girls."
He laughed.
"It was a pretty successful haunt," he said; "and possibly, now that
Mrs. Hawkins and your daughters--"
"Who?" I cried. "Mrs. What, and my which?"
"Your wife and children," he replied. "Now that the local chapter has
attended to them, maybe you'll apologize to me for your boorish behavior
at Florence."
"Those people were nothing to me," said I. "That was a boarding-school
you have driven crazy. I was merely coming here to lecture--"
I immediately perceived my mistake. He could now easily discover my
identity.
"Oho!" said he, with a broad, grim smile. "Then you lied to me at
Florence, and you are not Hawkins, but the man they call the spook
Boswell among us?"
"Yes, I am not Hawkins, and I am the other," I retorted. "Make the most
of it."
"I thought that was rather a large family of girls for one man to have,"
rejoined Jones. "But see here--are you going to apologize or not?"
"I am not," I cried. "Never in this world nor in the next, you miserable
handful of miasma!"
"Then, sir," said he, firmly, "I shall order a general strike for the
Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, and the strike will be on until you
do apologize. Hereafter you will have to derive your inspiration from a
contemplation of unskilled spooks, and, if I understand matters, you
will find some difficulty in raising even these, for there is not one
that I know of who doesn't belong to the union."
[Illustration: "THE THING FELL OVER LIMP"]
With that he vanished, and I sadly made my way back to my home. Once at
my desk again, I turned my attention to the work I had promised you,
and, to my chagrin, discovered that while I had in mind all the
ingredients of a successful Christmas story, I could not write it,
because Grand-Master-Spirit Jones had kept his word. One and all, my
selected group of spooks went out on strike. They absolutely refused to
pose unless I apologized to Jones, and by no persuasions, threats, or
cajoling have I been able since to make them rise up before me, that I
might present them to my readers with that degree of fidelity which I
deem essential. My home, which was once a sort of spirit club, is now
bare of even a semblance of a ghost worth writing up, and, conjure as I
may, I cannot bring them back. The strike is on, and I am its victim.
But one miserable little specimen have I discovered since my interview
with Jones, and so unskilled is he in the science of spooking that I
give you my word he could not make a baby shiver on a dark night with
the temperature twenty below zero and the wind howling like a madman
without; and as for making hair stand on end, I tried him on a bit of
hirsute from the tail of the timidest fawn in the Central Park zoo, and
the thing fell over as limp as a strand from the silken locks of the
Lorelei.
That, my dear sir, is why I cannot give you the story I have promised. I
hope you will understand that the fault is not my own, but is the result
of the evil tendency of the times, when the protective principle has
reached the ultimate of tyrannous absurdity.
While Jones is at the head of the Amalgamated Brotherhood my case is
hopeless, for I shall never apologize, unless he promises to restore to
poor Mrs. Brockton and her two hundred and eighty-three pupils their
former youthful gayety and prosperity, which, I understand upon inquiry,
he is unable to do, since the needed patent reversible spook, who will
restore blanched hair to its natural color and return the bloom of youth
to furrowed cheeks, has not yet been invented; and I, the only person in
the world who might have invented it, am powerless, for while the
boycott hangs over my head, as you will see for yourself, I am bereft of
the raw material for the conducting of the necessary experiments.