|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
in No. 13 bed.
I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.
All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
can't always be watching them.
But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted
to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
Even so great a man as Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as
Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to
sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
careful of his manures.
I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
We do not know much more of the Power that