had enough. But there will come a point for which I claim your
consideration. You, who cling to your ‘before’ and ‘after,’ has it
ever occurred to you how difficult it is to say _when_ an incident
takes place? Say that a man commits some crime of violence, can we
not, with a good deal of truth, say that he really commits that crime
when he definitely plans and determines upon it, dwelling on it with
gusto? The actual commission of it, I think we can reasonably argue,
is the mere material sequel of his resolve: he is guilty of it when he
makes that determination. When, therefore, in the term of ‘before’ and
‘after,’ does the crime truly take place? There is also in my story a
further point for your consideration. For it seems certain that the
spirit of a man, after the death of his body, is obliged to re-enact
such a crime, with a view, I suppose we may guess, to his remorse and
his eventual redemption. Those who have second sight have seen such
re-enactments. Perhaps he may have done his deed blindly in this life;
but then his spirit re-commits it with its spiritual eyes open, and
able to comprehend its enormity. So, shall we view the man’s original
determination and the material commission of his crime only as preludes
to the real commission of it, when with eyes unsealed he does it and
repents of it?... That all sounds very obscure when I speak in the
abstract, but I think you will see what I mean, if you follow my tale.
Comfortable? Got everything you want? Here goes, then.”
He leaned back in his chair, concentrating his mind, and then spoke:
“The story that I am about to tell you,” he said, “had its beginning
a month ago, when you were away in Switzerland. It reached its
conclusion, so I imagine, last night. I do not, at any rate, expect to
experience any more of it. Well, a month ago I was returning late on
a very wet night from dining out. There was not a taxi to be had, and
I hurried through the pouring rain to the tube-station at Piccadilly
Circus, and thought myself very lucky to catch the last train in this
direction. The carriage into which I stepped was quite empty except
for one other passenger, who sat next the door immediately opposite
to me. I had never, to my knowledge, seen him before, but I found my
attention vividly fixed on him, as if he somehow concerned me. He was
a man of middle age, in dress-clothes, and his face wore an expression
of intense thought, as if in his mind he was pondering some very
significant matter, and his hand which was resting on his knee clenched
and unclenched itself. Suddenly he looked up and stared me in the face,
and I saw there suspicion and fear, as if I had surprised him in some
secret deed.
“At that moment we stopped at Dover Street, and the conductor threw
open the doors, announced the station and added, ‘Change here for Hyde
Park Corner and Gloucester Road.’ That was all right for me since
it meant that the train would stop at Brompton Road, which was my
destination. It was all right apparently, too, for my companion, for he
certainly did not get out, and after a moment’s stop, during which no
one else got in, we went on. I saw him, I must insist, after the doors
were closed and the train had started. But when I looked again, as we
rattled on, I saw that there was no one there. I was quite alone in the
carriage.
“Now you may think that I had had one of those swift momentary dreams
which flash in and out of the mind in the space of a second, but I did
not believe it was so myself, for I felt that I had experienced some
sort of premonition or clairvoyant vision. A man, the semblance of
whom, astral body or whatever you may choose to call it, I had just
seen, would sometime sit in that seat opposite to me, pondering and
planning.”
“But why?” I asked. “Why should it have been the astral body of a
living man which you thought you had seen? Why not the ghost of a dead
one?”
“Because of my own sensations. The sight of the spirit of someone dead,
which has occurred to me two or three times in my life, has always been
accompanied by a physical shrinking and fear, and by the sensation of
cold and of loneliness. I believed, at any rate, that I had seen a
phantom of the living, and that impression was confirmed, I might say
proved, the next day. For I met the man himself. And the next night, as
you shall hear, I met the phantom again. We will take them in order.
“I was lunching, then, the next day with my neighbour Mrs. Stanley:
there was a small party, and when I arrived we waited but for the final
guest. He entered while I was talking to some friend, and presently at
my elbow I heard Mrs. Stanley’s voice--
“‘Let me introduce you to Sir Henry Payle,’ she said.
“I turned and saw my _vis-à-vis_ of the night before. It was quite
unmistakably he, and as we shook hands he looked at me I thought with
vague and puzzled recognition.
“‘Haven’t we met before, Mr. Carling?’ he said. ‘I seem to
recollect----’
“For the moment I forgot the strange manner of his disappearance from
the carriage, and thought that it had been the man himself whom I had
seen last night.
“‘Surely, and not so long ago,’ I said. ‘For we sat opposite each other
in the last tube-train from Piccadilly Circus yesterday night.’
“He still looked at me, frowning, puzzled, and shook his head.
“‘That can hardly be,’ he said. ‘I only came up from the country this
morning.’
“Now this interested me profoundly, for the astral body, we are told,
abides in some half-conscious region of the mind or spirit, and has
recollections of what has happened to it, which it can convey only very
vaguely and dimly to the conscious mind. All lunch-time I could see his
eyes again and again directed to me with the same puzzled and perplexed
air, and as I was taking my departure he came up to me.
“‘I shall recollect some day,’ he said, ‘where we met before, and I
hope we may meet again. Was it not----?’--and he stopped. ‘No: it has
gone from me,’ he added.”
The log that Anthony had thrown on the fire was burning bravely now,
and its high-flickering flame lit up his face.
“Now, I don’t know whether you believe in coincidences as chance
things,” he said, “but if you do, get rid of the notion. Or if you
can’t at once, call it a coincidence that that very night I again
caught the last train on the tube going westwards. This time, so far
from my being a solitary passenger, there was a considerable crowd
waiting at Dover Street, where I entered, and just as the noise of the
approaching train began to reverberate in the tunnel I caught sight of
Sir Henry Payle standing near the opening from which the train would
presently emerge, apart from the rest of the crowd. And I thought to
myself how odd it was that I should have seen the phantom of him at
this very hour last night and the man himself now, and I began walking
towards him with the idea of saying, ‘Anyhow, it is in the tube that we
meet to-night.’... And then a terrible and awful thing happened. Just
as the train emerged from the tunnel he jumped down on to the line in
front of it, and the train swept along over him up the platform.
“For a moment I was stricken with horror at the sight, and I remember
covering my eyes against the dreadful tragedy. But then I perceived
that, though it had taken place in full sight of those who were
waiting, no one seemed to have seen it except myself. The driver,
looking out from his window, had not applied his brakes, there was no
jolt from the advancing train, no scream, no cry, and the rest of the
passengers began boarding the train with perfect nonchalance. I must
have staggered, for I felt sick and faint with what I had seen, and
some kindly soul put his arm round me and supported me into the train.
He was a doctor, he told me, and asked if I was in pain, or what ailed
me. I told him what I thought I had seen, and he assured me that no
such accident had taken place.
“It was clear then to my own mind that I had seen the second act, so
to speak, in this psychical drama, and I pondered next morning over
the problem as to what I should do. Already I had glanced at the
morning paper, which, as I knew would be the case, contained no mention
whatever of what I had seen. The thing had certainly not happened, but
I knew in myself that it would happen. The flimsy veil of Time had been
withdrawn from my eyes, and I had seen into what you would call the
future. In terms of Time of course it was the future, but from my point
of view the thing was just as much in the past as it was in the future.
It existed, and waited only for its material fulfilment. The more I
thought about it, the more I saw that I could do nothing.”
I interrupted his narrative.
“You did nothing?” I exclaimed. “Surely you might have taken some step
in order to try to avert the tragedy.”
He shook his head.
“What step precisely?” he said. “Was I to go to Sir Henry and
tell him that once more I had seen him in the tube in the act of
committing suicide? Look at it like this. Either what I had seen was
pure illusion, pure imagination, in which case it had no existence or
significance at all, or it was actual and real, and essentially it had
happened. Or take it, though not very logically, somewhere between
the two. Say that the idea of suicide, for some cause of which I knew
nothing, had occurred to him or would occur. Should I not, if that was
the case, be doing a very dangerous thing, by making such a suggestion
to him? Might not the fact of my telling him what I had seen put
the idea into his mind, or, if it was already there, confirm it and
strengthen it? ‘It’s a ticklish matter to play with souls,’ as Browning
says.”
“But it seems so inhuman not to interfere in any way,” said I, “not to
make any attempt.”
“What interference?” asked he. “What attempt?”
The human instinct in me still seemed to cry aloud at the thought of
doing nothing to avert such a tragedy, but it seemed to be beating
itself against something austere and inexorable. And cudgel my brain
as I would, I could not combat the sense of what he had said. I had no
answer for him, and he went on.
“You must recollect, too,” he said, “that I believed then and believe
now that the thing had happened. The cause of it, whatever that was,
had begun to work, and the effect, in this material sphere, was
inevitable. That is what I alluded to when, at the beginning of my
story, I asked you to consider how difficult it was to say when an
action took place. You still hold that this particular action, this
suicide of Sir Henry, had not yet taken place, because he had not
yet thrown himself under the advancing train. To me that seems a
materialistic view. I hold that in all but the endorsement of it, so to
speak, it had taken place. I fancy that Sir Henry, for instance, now
free from the material dusks, knows that himself.”
Exactly as he spoke there swept through the warm lit room a current of
ice-cold air, ruffling my hair as it passed me, and making the wood
flames on the hearth to dwindle and flare. I looked round to see if the
door at my back had opened, but nothing stirred there, and over the
closed window the curtains were fully drawn. As it reached Anthony, he
sat up quickly in his chair and directed his glance this way and that
about the room.
“Did you feel that?” he asked.
“Yes: a sudden draught,” I said. “Ice-cold.”
“Anything else?” he asked. “Any other sensation?”
I paused before I answered, for at the moment there occurred to me
Anthony’s differentiation of the effects produced on the beholder by
a phantasm of the living and the apparition of the dead. It was the
latter which accurately described my sensations now, a certain physical
shrinking, a fear, a feeling of desolation. But yet I had seen nothing.
“I felt rather creepy,” I said.
As I spoke I drew my chair rather closer to the fire, and sent a swift
and, I confess, a somewhat apprehensive scrutiny round the walls of the
brightly lit room. I noticed at the same time that Anthony was peering
across to the chimney-piece, on which, just below a sconce holding two
electric lights, stood the clock which at the beginning of our talk he
had offered to stop. The hands I noticed pointed to twenty-five minutes
to one.
“But you saw nothing?” he asked.
“Nothing whatever,” I said. “Why should I? What was there to see? Or
did you----”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Somehow this answer got on my nerves, for the queer feeling which had
accompanied that cold current of air had not left me. If anything it
had become more acute.
“But surely you know whether you saw anything or not?” I said.
“One can’t always be certain,” said he. “I say that I don’t think I
saw anything. But I’m not sure, either, whether the story I am telling
you was quite concluded last night. I think there may be a further
incident. If you prefer it, I will leave the rest of it, as far as I
know it, unfinished till to-morrow morning, and you can go off to bed
now.”
His complete calmness and tranquillity reassured me.
“But why should I do that?” I asked.
Again he looked round on the bright walls.
“Well, I think something entered the room just now,” he said, “and
it may develop. If you don’t like the notion, you had better go. Of
course there’s nothing to be alarmed at; whatever it is, it can’t hurt
us. But it is close on the hour when on two successive nights I saw
what I have already told you, and an apparition usually occurs at the
same time. Why that is so, I cannot say, but certainly it looks as if
a spirit that is earth-bound is still subject to certain conventions,
the conventions of time for instance. I think that personally I shall
see something before long, but most likely you won’t. You’re not such a
sufferer as I from these--these delusions----”
I was frightened and knew it, but I was also intensely interested, and
some perverse pride wriggled within me at his last words. Why, so I
asked myself, shouldn’t I see whatever was to be seen?...
“I don’t want to go in the least,” I said. “I want to hear the rest of
your story.”
“Where was I, then? Ah, yes: you were wondering why I didn’t do
something after I saw the train move up to the platform, and I said
that there was nothing to be done. If you think it over, I fancy you
will agree with me.... A couple of days passed, and on the third
morning I saw in the paper that there had come fulfilment to my vision.
Sir Henry Payle, who had been waiting on the platform of Dover Street
Station for the last train to South Kensington, had thrown himself in
front of it as it came into the station. The train had been pulled up
in a couple of yards, but a wheel had passed over his chest, crushing
it in and instantly killing him.
“An inquest was held, and there emerged at it one of those dark stories
which, on occasions like these, sometimes fall like a midnight shadow
across a life that the world perhaps had thought prosperous. He had
long been on bad terms with his wife, from whom he had lived apart,
and it appeared that not long before this he had fallen desperately in
love with another woman. The night before his suicide he had appeared
very late at his wife’s house, and had a long and angry scene with
her in which he entreated her to divorce him, threatening otherwise
to make her life a hell to her. She refused, and in an ungovernable
fit of passion he attempted to strangle her. There was a struggle, and
the noise of it caused her manservant to come up, who succeeded in
over-mastering him. Lady Payle threatened to proceed against him for
assault with the intention to murder her. With this hanging over his
head, the next night, as I have already told you, he committed suicide.”
He glanced at the clock again, and I saw that the hands now pointed to
ten minutes to one. The fire was beginning to burn low and the room
surely was growing strangely cold.
“That’s not quite all,” said Anthony, again looking round. “Are you
sure you wouldn’t prefer to hear it to-morrow?”
The mixture of shame and pride and curiosity again prevailed.
“No: tell me the rest of it at once,” I said.
Before speaking, he peered suddenly at some point behind my chair,
shading his eyes. I followed his glance, and knew what he meant by
saying that sometimes one could not be sure whether one saw something
or not. But was that an outlined shadow that intervened between me and
the wall? It was difficult to focus; I did not know whether it was near
the wall or near my chair. It seemed to clear away, anyhow, as I looked
more closely at it.
“You see nothing?” asked Anthony.
“No: I don’t think so,” said I. “And you?”
“I think I do,” he said, and his eyes followed something which was
invisible to mine. They came to rest between him and the chimney-piece.
Looking steadily there, he spoke again.
“All this happened some weeks ago,” he said, “when you were out in
Switzerland, and since then, up till last night, I saw nothing further.
But all the time I was expecting something further. I felt that, as
far as I was concerned, it was not all over yet, and last night, with
the intention of assisting any communication to come through to me
from--from beyond, I went into the Dover Street tube-station at a few
minutes before one o’clock, the hour at which both the assault and
the suicide had taken place. The platform when I arrived on it was
absolutely empty, or appeared to be so, but presently, just as I began
to hear the roar of the approaching train, I saw there was the figure
of a man standing some twenty yards from me, looking into the tunnel.
He had not come down with me in the lift, and the moment before he had
not been there. He began moving towards me, and then I saw who it was,
and I felt a stir of wind icy-cold coming towards me as he approached.
It was not the draught that heralds the approach of a train, for it
came from the opposite direction. He came close up to me, and I saw
there was recognition in his eyes. He raised his face towards me and
I saw his lips move, but, perhaps in the increasing noise from the
tunnel, I heard nothing come from them. He put out his hand, as if
entreating me to do something, and with a cowardice from which I cannot
forgive myself, I shrank from him, for I knew, by the sign that I have
told you, that this was one from the dead, and my flesh quaked before
him, drowning for the moment all pity and all desire to help him, if
that was possible. Certainly he had something which he wanted of me,
but I recoiled from him. And by now the train was emerging from the
tunnel, and next moment, with a dreadful gesture of despair, he threw
himself in front of it.”
As he finished speaking he got up quickly from his chair, still looking
fixedly in front of him. I saw his pupils dilate, and his mouth worked.
“It is coming,” he said. “I am to be given a chance of atoning for
my cowardice. There is nothing to be afraid of: I must remember that
myself....”
As he spoke there came from the panelling above the chimney-piece one
loud shattering crack, and the cold wind again circled about my head.
I found myself shrinking back in my chair with my hands held in front
of me as instinctively I screened myself against something which I knew
was there but which I could not see. Every sense told me that there was
a presence in the room other than mine and Anthony’s, and the horror of
it was that I could not see it. Any vision, however terrible, would, I
felt, be more tolerable than this clear certain knowledge that close to
me was this invisible thing. And yet what horror might not be disclosed
of the face of the dead and the crushed chest.... But all I could see,
as I shuddered in this cold wind, was the familiar walls of the room,
and Anthony standing in front of me stiff and firm, making, as I knew,
a call on his courage. His eyes were focused on something quite close
to him, and some semblance of a smile quivered on his mouth. And then
he spoke again.
“Yes, I know you,” he said. “And you want something of me. Tell me,
then, what it is.”
There was absolute silence, but what was silence to my ears could not
have been so to his, for once or twice he nodded, and once he said,
“Yes: I see. I will do it.” And with the knowledge that, even as there
was someone here whom I could not see, so there was speech going on
which I could not hear, this terror of the dead and of the unknown
rose in me with the sense of powerlessness to move that accompanies
nightmare. I could not stir, I could not speak. I could only strain my
ears for the inaudible and my eyes for the unseen, while the cold wind
from the very valley of the shadow of death streamed over me. It was
not that the presence of death itself was terrible; it was that from
its tranquillity and serene keeping there had been driven some unquiet
soul unable to rest in peace for whatever ultimate awakening rouses the
countless generations of those who have passed away, driven, no less,
from whatever activities are theirs, back into the material world from
which it should have been delivered. Never, until the gulf between the
living and the dead was thus bridged, had it seemed so immense and so
unnatural. It is possible that the dead may have communication with
the living, and it was not that exactly that so terrified me, for such
communication, as we know it, comes voluntarily from them. But here was
something icy-cold and crime-laden, that was chased back from the peace
that would not pacify it.
And then, most horrible of all, there came a change in these unseen
conditions. Anthony was silent now, and from looking straight and
fixedly in front of him, he began to glance sideways to where I sat and
back again, and with that I felt that the unseen presence had turned
its attention from him to me. And now, too, gradually and by awful
degrees I began to see....
There came an outline of shadow across the chimney-piece and the panels
above it. It took shape: it fashioned itself into the outline of a
man. Within the shape of the shadow details began to form themselves,
and I saw wavering in the air, like something concealed by haze, the
semblance of a face, stricken and tragic, and burdened with such a
weight of woe as no human face had ever worn. Next, the shoulders
outlined themselves, and a stain livid and red spread out below them,
and suddenly the vision leaped into clearness. There he stood, the
chest crushed in and drowned in the red stain, from which broken ribs,
like the bones of a wrecked ship, protruded. The mournful, terrible
eyes were fixed on me, and it was from them, so I knew, that the bitter
wind proceeded....
Then, quick as the switching off of a lamp, the spectre vanished, and
the bitter wind was still, and opposite to me stood Anthony, in a
quiet, bright-lit room. There was no sense of an unseen presence any
more; he and I were then alone, with an interrupted conversation still
dangling between us in the warm air. I came round to that, as one comes
round after an anæsthetic. It all swam into sight again, unreal at
first, and gradually assuming the texture of actuality.
“You were talking to somebody, not to me,” I said. “Who was it? What
was it?”
He passed the back of his hand over his forehead, which glistened in
the light.
“A soul in hell,” he said.
Now it is hard ever to recall mere physical sensations, when they
have passed. If you have been cold and are warmed, it is difficult to
remember what cold was like: if you have been hot and have got cool,
it is difficult to realise what the oppression of heat really meant.
Just so, with the passing of that presence, I found myself unable to
recapture the sense of the terror with which, a few moments ago only,
it had invaded and inspired me.
“A soul in hell?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
He moved about the room for a minute or so, and then came and sat on
the arm of my chair.
“I don’t know what you saw,” he said, “or what you felt, but there has
never in all my life happened to me anything more real than what these
last few minutes have brought. I have talked to a soul in the hell of
remorse, which is the only possible hell. He knew, from what happened
last night, that he could perhaps establish communication through me
with the world he had quitted, and he sought me and found me. I am
charged with a mission to a woman I have never seen, a message from the
contrite.... You can guess who it is....”
He got up with a sudden briskness.
“Let’s verify it anyhow,” he said. “He gave me the street and the
number. Ah, there’s the telephone book! Would it be a coincidence
merely if I found that at No. 20 in Chasemore Street, South Kensington,
there lived a Lady Payle?”
He turned over the leaves of the bulky volume.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said.
Roderick’s Story
Roderick’s Story