I
"The only objection I have to ghost stories," said young Sanford, "is
from a literary point of view. They're so badly done, you know."
"In what way?" said the clerk of the hotel, settling back in his office
chair, and smiling at young Sanford and the circle of men who had come
down for their keys from the billiard-room.
"Well, in this way. I'm not considering the little harmless stories
where the heroes are only frightened, or even those where their heads
are grey in the morning. I'm thinking of those where they never live
to tell the awful tale, you know; the ones in which they tell their
friends to come if they call, and then they never call; the ones in
which, although they scream and scream, nobody hears them.
"And yet the old trembling man who points them to the haunted room
knows perfectly well that five men have entered that room on five
nineteenths of October, and never come out alive. Yet he only warns
them, or at most only beseeches them not to go in. He has no police
force--not that police could seriously harm the ghosts, but somehow
they never appear to the police; he does not arrange with the victim's
friend to burst in the door at twelve-thirty, anyhow, whether they are
summoned or not; he doesn't--but then, what do any of them do that they
might be expected to? And all this forced condition of things so that
the ghost may have all the evening to work quietly in. Do you mean to
tell me that if I were frightened to the extent of grey hair in the
morning, I couldn't scream loud enough to be heard any distance?"
This speech drew nods of approval from several of the men. "I've
thought of that, too," said the clerk. In a dark corner behind the
stove sat a man, hunched over his knees, silent, and apparently unknown
to any of the others. At this point he looked up, cleared his throat,
and said in a strange, husky voice:
"Do you really suppose that that is anything else than nonsense?" Young
Sanford flushed. "Sir"--he began. The other continued in his rough,
thick voice:
"Do you suppose they don't try to scream? Do you suppose they don't
_think_ they're screaming?"
A little silence of discomfort fell on the circle. There was something
disagreeably suggestive in the question. Suddenly the man spoke again.
"I had a friend," he said, "in fact, I had two friends. One was
young--about your age," nodding to Sanford. "The other was older. He
was not so clever nor so attractive nor so brilliant nor so jolly as
the younger, but he had a characteristic--perhaps his only one--for he
was a very ordinary man. He had an iron will. His determination was
as unbreakable as anything human could be. And he was devoted to his
friend, who, somehow, loved him. I don't know why, because he had so
many other admirers--but he stuck to his friend--Joan. They called the
two Darby and Joan. Their real names were not unlike those, and it was
rather funny. Darby used to talk as you were talking, sir," he nodded
again to Sanford, "and he was sure, cock sure, that what he said was
right. He would tell what things were possible and what were not, and
prove what he said very nicely. Joan wasn't clever, but he knew that it
does no good to call a thing impossible. He knew, in fact, that nothing
is more possible than the most impossible things."
The man coughed and cleared his throat and waited a moment as if to see
whether he were intruding. No one spoke, so he went on.
"One day Darby rushed into Joan's study and told him of a haunted mill
he'd discovered. It was one of the old mills where the farmers used to
bring their sacks before the big concerns in the West swallowed all the
little trades. It was dusty and cobwebbed and broken down and unused
and haunted. And there was a farmhouse directly across the road and a
house on either side of it not a hundred feet away.
"'Was it always haunted?' asked Joan. 'No,' said Darby, 'only once
a year.' On Christmas eve every year for nineteen years there had
appeared, late at night, a little light in one of the windows; and that
side of the house had an odd look, somehow it seemed to look fresher
and newer, and at one o'clock or so a horrible piercing shriek would
ring out from the mill, and then a kind of crashing fall, and then all
was still, and the light would disappear.
"'Had nobody investigated?' Oh, yes. The first year it was noticed
was when houses were built up around it. It used to stand away from
everything else, and the miller and his family lived there. Then, long
after they were dead, people moved out there and heard the noises
and saw the light. They thought of tramps and escaped criminals and
everything one suggests till it had occurred too repeatedly for that,
and then a young farmer went over one Christmas eve, not telling any
one, and they found him roaming about the mill, a hopeless wreck the
next day; he had gone quite mad.
"And the next year a man came up from the city, and his friends were in
the next room to help him if he called, and he didn't call, and they
were afraid to startle him by knocking, so they got a ladder and peeped
into the window at ten minutes to one, and he lay peacefully on the
bed with his eyes closed and his hands stretched loosely out, and they
thought it was a great joke that he should sleep through it, so they
went home, and in the morning they found him in horrible convulsions,
and he never recovered.
"And there were two young divinity students that went once together,
and they had a crowd along with instructions to break in the door at
one exactly. And at the stroke of one the crowd beat in the great
door and burst into an empty room! They had gone up a flight too far,
somehow, and as they stood staring at each other, from the room beneath
them came a dreadful shriek and a crash, and when they rushed down they
found the boys in a dead faint. They brought them to and got them home,
and they muttered nonsense about a dog and a sash and would say no
more. And they escaped with severe nervous prostration. But later they
lost what little nerve they had and couldn't sleep at night, and joined
the Catholic Church, because they said that there were things they
found it difficult to reconcile....
"'And what was the story of it all?' asked Joan. Oh, the story was
disagreeable enough. The miller's daughter wanted to marry a poor young
man, but her father would not let her. And she refused to accept his
rich nephew. So he locked her in her room till she should consent. And
she stayed there a week. And one night the nephew came home late and
saw a tiny light in her window, and presently he saw some one place
a ladder and go softly up, and the miller's daughter leaned out and
helped him in. So he told her father, who came into her room the next
night with a bloodhound, and bound her to the bed and hushed her cries
with her sash, and lit the little light. And when her lover had climbed
the ladder--the dog was there. And that was Christmas eve.
"'Do the people suffer this without complaint--these deaths and
convulsions and apostasies?' asked Joan. Well, no. But if they
destroyed the mill a liquor saloon would go up immediately. The
proprietor was simply waiting. And they didn't want that. So they
kept it quiet. And nobody need go there. Nobody had been alarmed
or hurt except the meddlers. And in villages the people have less
scientific curiosity. But Darby was going immediately. It was December
twenty-third now. Joan must come, too; it would be most exciting. Joan
argued against it, but he too was curious, so they agreed to go. And
the next day they went."