THE WRAITH OF THE ARMY GENTLEMAN
To some people life is an unspeakable tragedy; to others it is a mere
farce. To all it is a profound mystery.
What am I? Where have I come from? Where am I going? What is this
mysterious ego that thinks and acts?
From Darwin we learn that the human body has taken a million years to
evolve its present form. Is it logical to suppose that there is no
scheme of evolution for the immortal soul, in which it can preserve its
individuality through the ages? The mills of God grind slowly, and what
is seventy or eighty years in eternity, in which we develop the highest
and most complex organism we can conceive of--the Soul?
Five hundred and thirty-five years B. C. Pythagoras was teaching the
reincarnation of the immortal soul in his celebrated school. Plato,
Socrates, Aristotle, Philo, Virgil, Cicero, Euclid, the Egyptians and
the Hindoos taught the same doctrine. In the days of Christ the
transmigration of souls was an accepted belief, and in 250 A. D. Origen,
the greatest of the Christian Fathers, was still teaching the same
doctrine. Justin Martyr recognized the presence of the Logos in Jesus,
and Socrates and Clement of Alexandria affirmed that the same philosophy
had brought the Greeks to Christ. To this day it remains the belief of
three-fourths of the human race.
In our country, though a rapidly growing faith, Buddhism fails to
command the attention it otherwise would, for two reasons. Firstly, we
have never been a religious-minded people, and are now very much less so
than formerly. What are loosely termed religious subjects interest a
very few, and bore intensely the great majority. Out of our forty-four
million souls, a mere handful are interested in a future life. The rest
prefer not to take the problem into consideration, though they are ready
to accept a small dose of conventional religion, ready-made and
pre-digested. Secondly, faith in the transmigration of souls in a
succession of physical bodies only becomes an urgent mental necessity, a
vitally necessary explanation of life's inequalities, to those who mix
with the outcast poor. Such persons are again comparatively few, and, to
those of them who think, life without reincarnation is simply an
incomprehensible and chaotic puzzle.
Once the faith is grasped that life between birth and death is only a
tiny fragment of the aeons allotted to us, in which to develop
spiritually, divine harmony; love and justice reappear. Only thus can
one see light. But if the tardy growth of this all-sufficient
illumination is slow to take root, it must be remembered that to the
ordinary, well-to-do person it makes no appeal.
"Am I my brother's keeper?" is generally answered in the negative, and
the hypocritical rejoinder, covering a mountain of selfishness, that it
is an impertinence to pry into the lives of the poor, is the facile
excuse for sitting at ease and cozening the conscience into the belief
that the poor are God's affair. Even the devout and pious, who may feel
deep compassion for the sorrow of the destitute, have no spur to prick
their mental apathy, unless they mix freely and constantly with the
poor and oppressed. Only then will come the perplexed question: Where
can I see in all this overwhelming misery the Divine hand of love and
justice?
The Christ who established his Brotherhood with us, by proclaiming God
the Universal Father, told us that "Before Abraham was, I am," and I
suppose that most people, who accept anything, accept the pre-existence
of Christ. Yet how few of us can remember anything of our own past
lives, and how merciful it is that we cannot. How utterly overwhelming
such memory would be! The future is as carefully hidden from us as the
past, yet our previous lives have been by no means unfruitful.
The experiences we have gathered in the past years of this life are
nearly all forgotten, yet our development has gone on, and the records
are stored in the subconsciousness, sometimes to be pulled across the
threshold and displayed in a complete panorama before the dying eyes.
The statements to this effect made by those who have been resuscitated
when at the point of death by drowning, are too numerous to be discarded
as mere fables.
Undoubtedly we all contain the germs of sin at birth, but few educated
people now accept the statements that we are born sinful because our
parents sinned, or because of the moral delinquencies of those of Eden.
Certainly we all bear the consequences of others' sins, but the cruel
injustice of a God who deliberately punishes present humanity for the
sins of past humanity is too revolting a conception of the Creator to
gain acceptance to-day.
This very fact shows that we have advanced spiritually. So base a
conception of the Almighty is violently repugnant to serious thinkers.
The intuitive consciousness of man postulates the over-ruling spirit as
a power representing perfect justice and love, and the innate instinct
to believe that we ourselves are in some mysterious way akin to this
Divine Ideal keeps ever alive the belief in our Divine origin.
What is the grand apotheosis of each human life? The Christ spirit; a
scheme of regenerative redemption, simple, natural, yet superlatively
grand.
If one asks whether the orbs in space take precedence of personal will
and intelligence, or personal will and intelligence take precedence of
the orbs in space, one has only to ask whether builders or buildings
have priority. Do pictures originate the artist? do books originate the
author? If one begins to study with a belief in spirit as power and
cause, one can account for all things, but to start with matter as a
foundation is to fail absolutely to account for either matter or spirit.
In some infinite womb the vital Heavens, the visible Universe must have
existed before time was. We see all elements have their affinities, all
stars their course, all atoms their polarity. We see the wheel of
Ezekiel symbolizing the whole scheme and fabric of Nature.
Heaven works not only with stupendous immensities but with small
minorities. Atoms of unutterable minuteness are streaming into the
unseen atmosphere every second from the souls and bodies of the human
race. When the soul seeks, aspires after God, the most vital of all
atoms go forth with the breath, as light from the sun to the earth.
Surely we and our angel kindred inhabit one house of which the most
distant provinces are in touch with the center of all. Heaven and earth
are bridged by the spirit ladder of love, and the soul can inbreathe the
spirit of God as the body inbreathes oxygen.
The contemplative mind beholds every day the passage of things invisible
into sight, the transfer of the seen into the unseen, and all is
natural. The life throb of the palpable world is a pulsation going forth
every instant from the eternal energy, drawing out by an ethereal medium
from the invisible and intangible, that which is visible and tangible.
I will speak now of the passage of a thing invisible into sight. How, to
me, it became so I cannot tell. I don't know.
One summer evening my husband and I were occupying two communicating
bedrooms in a London hotel, contiguous with one of the great railway
stations. We had to make an early start in the morning, and had come
there to be near our train.
I awakened in the early morning hours. The gray dawn was just beginning
to show through the bars of the Venetian blinds lowered before the two
windows. Those bars had not been adjusted, and they also admitted a
rather bright light from a street lamp. I judged it to be somewhere
about four o'clock, but I did not look at my watch. I was too
pre-occupied in looking at something else.
My bare arm was stretched outside the coverlet, and I was aware that
what had awakened me was a cold wind blowing on my skin. The furniture
of the room was dimly outlined, and at first I vaguely threw my
half-open eyes around without perceiving anything unusual, but gradually
my senses, shaking off their drowsiness, became aware of movement
between the bed and the window. Something tall and gray was wavering
like a pillar of smoke betwixt me and the struggling daylight. I closed
my eyes again with a creepy feeling, a disinclination to look again, but
my bare arm, which still lay outside the coverlet, received another
intimation that roused me to keen alertness. A chill wind was blowing
over my skin.
I drew in my arm hastily, and opened my eyes. That tall gray something
had approached much nearer to me, and now I could distinguish with
perfect clearness the figure of a man, but such a wavering, fluid form
that one moment seemed on the point of dissolving into thin air, and the
next moment gathering itself together again in clear cut outline.
For what seemed to me a long time I stared at the gray apparition. I
felt a cold fear, a rigid horror creep over me, and but for the
recollection of my husband's nearness, and the open door between us, I
might have fainted from pure terror. I thought of calling to him, but
something sinister in that wavering shadow made me desist. At times the
form came quite close to the bed, but I could never see the face
clearly; it was vague and undetermined in outline, in fact, not
completely materialized. Not for a second did that wavering movement
cease, that floating, shimmering motion 'twixt bed and window, of what I
knew to be the ghost of a man.
How long this unpleasant state of things continued I do not know. I was
perfectly well aware that a ghost should be addressed in sympathetic
terms, should be asked if any human help can be rendered, but at the
time it never once occurred to me to speak. Gradually, as I watched that
retreating then advancing form, at moments opaque, then almost
transparent, I lost consciousness and fell asleep again.
I was awakened a few hours later by a loud knocking at my door. I slid
instantly out of bed, turned the key, and was confronted by the
chambermaid, bringing my early tea.
"Who was the man who killed himself in this room?"
Luckily, the woman did not drop the tray, as I hurled at her this abrupt
question. She set the tea down on a table and turned to me a scared
face, as she answered by another question:
"How ever did you find out that?"
"Never mind how I found out. Please answer me. I won't get you into
trouble," I said firmly.
"It was an army gentleman. He shot himself here the night before last.
That's all I know," was her subdued answer.
Poor "army gentleman"! So you were revisiting the scene of your last
tragedy, or had you ever left that confined space between four walls
which witnessed the supreme mental agony of the suicide?
What had prompted me to put that sudden question to the chambermaid? I
could not tell. In the moment of waking, slipping out of bed and opening
the door, no recollection had come to me of my earlier experience, but
betwixt that experience and my abrupt waking at her knock knowledge must
have been somehow afforded me of the tragedy. I knew a man had done
himself to death in that room shortly before I occupied it.
A day or two afterwards I read an account of the inquest held upon the
body. A rankling sense of unjust treatment had preyed upon his brain.
Suicide whilst of unsound mind was the verdict. Poor "army gentleman," I
fear I could have been of little service to you, even if I had opened
up some form of communication between myself and your disembodied soul!
When one remembers how many persons occupy even one room in a hotel in
twelve months, it seems natural that psychic phenomena should be common
to such houses. Undoubtedly many tragedies must be enacted in every
hotel within a comparatively short space of time, and one may, in utter
unconsciousness, occupy a bedroom in which, but the night before, murder
or suicide has taken place.
Some years ago, I had occasion to pass a night in one of the big West
End hotels of London. It was very full, and I had to be content with a
very indifferent room on the main entrance floor, and looking to the
back. The window had iron bars in front of it, through which one could
slip one's head, but not one's shoulders. The reason for the bars was
obvious. A wide mews ran on a level with this floor of the house, and
failing this obstruction any one could have stepped with perfect ease
from the pavement into the room.
Thrusting my head through the bars I could see from end to end of the
mews. On the left there was no exit, on the right was a narrow lane
running down the side of the hotel, and leading into the main
thoroughfare. The mews seemed very quiet, clean and respectable, and for
one night only I decided that the room would do. I was very tired after
passing two nights in a train, and went early to bed and fell asleep at
once.
I ascertained afterwards that I had been sleeping for five hours, when I
was suddenly awakened by a loud noise of scuffling feet, accompanied by
a gurgling choking sound, as if some one was struggling to find
utterance, to gain breath.
To be awakened by a noise out of a sound sleep is always a startling,
uncomfortable experience. If the astral body has been wandering far
afield, it has to return to the physical body in far too great a hurry
for comfort. There is always more or less of a dislocating jar under
such circumstances. The startled sensation is greatly accentuated when,
in place of waking to dead silence, one awakens to unaccountable and
very unpleasant sounds.
I lay perfectly still, with every nerve tingling, and every muscle taut,
and listened intently. The noise came from the window which was shut,
and my heart began to beat more thickly with a dread and terror which
had neither form nor shape. Slowly I remembered the mews outside, and
felt instantly thankful that because of its proximity I had shut the
window, instead of sleeping with it wide open, as is my custom.
Was murder taking place out there? What was that hideous, choking sound,
that surged in with guttural gasps from out the darkness, and which
suggested nothing so much as a frenzied struggle of loathing and
agonized fear?
I lay shuddering and quaking as with the grip of ague. My imagination
instantly constructed the scene so vividly suggested by the nature of
the sounds. A man's hands were on the throat of a woman, and he was
deliberately strangling the life out of her struggling body. I was sick
with unspeakable agonies of dread, and for quite five minutes I could
not summon force or motion to my limbs.
If some unfortunate was being done to death it was clearly my duty to
run to the window and give the alarm by shrieking "murder," but now I
began to wonder if that awful struggle was taking place outside or just
inside my room. Though the mews was well lit my blind was drawn down,
and the room was in darkness, except for a faint reflection shining in
from a street lamp. I had only to stretch out my hand in order to switch
on a light above my bed, but a paralysis of fear held me.
That noise of infinite pain, of frantic, dying agony, those convulsive,
ghastly groans and scuffling of feet, and wrestling, writhing bodies,
were spell-binding beyond the power of human conception, and the most
awe-inspiring fantasy. I tried to reason with myself, but the horror
scattered all reasoning, yet a sense of duty, of natural humanity, and
anger with my own fears, kept tugging at me. It seemed as if the sounds
were losing force, were beginning to die out. I was lying still in
abject terror, whilst a fellow-creature was being deliberately done to
death.
A blind fury with myself, and the murderer, suddenly superseded fear.
Without turning on the light I jumped out of bed, and knocking up
against the furniture in my haste, I dashed towards the faint light
coming in from the street. In another moment I had thrust aside the
blind, and thrown the window wide. I know I shouted out something; I
have no idea what. I thrust my head out between the iron bars, and
looked to right and left. I could see absolutely nothing. The street was
quite empty, and so well lit that I could see from end to end of it.
I drew in my head, and stood there silently, and quivering still with
excitement, as one does when awakened with the broken fragments of an
evil dream.
Then, suddenly, a sensation of bristling fear took possession of me once
more, unreasoning and unreasonable fear, clutching at my heart with a
grip of ice. The noise had not ceased, it continued more faintly, and it
came from a corner of my room to the right of the window. Murder had
been done in the room in which I now stood, and was being re-enacted
now. The certainty rushed on me with the force of a whirlwind.
I was dimly conscious of human voices in the mews, of a window being
thrown open. My cry had awakened other sleepers. I left my window open,
and let the blind fall before it. Then I crept softly across to the
opposite side of the room, whence the dying sound proceeded. The victim
was almost dead. I could hear nothing but a gasping, rattling sigh, and
then silence. The silence of death.
I was roused from my trance of horror by the measured tread of a
policeman outside. I heard him speaking with others, then, seeing
nothing to account for the disturbance in the mews, he went away again,
and I fell asleep from utter mental exhaustion.
When I awoke the sun was in the room, and I looked towards the corner
where the tragedy of the darkness had been enacted. How peaceful and
innocent the room now looked, in the light of a cheerful summer morning,
and how thankful I was to know that I would be far away from it in a
very few hours.
Yet another hotel story comes to me as I write.
My sister and her husband came to Torquay to spend a couple of nights
and took rooms in one of the principal hotels. They had not announced
their arrival beforehand, and the manageress took them upstairs to see
several vacant rooms. There was one not shown to them, but the door was
wide open, and my sister seeing that it was unoccupied walked in, and
said she preferred it to any of the others, because of its particular
view.
For some unknown reason the manageress was greatly against their taking
it; she raised every sort of objection, but my sister was firm, and
finally the luggage was carried up and she began to unpack, whilst her
husband went down to order tea.
After a few minutes, and whilst she was on her knees beside the trunk,
she heard some one moving in the room behind her, but she could see
nothing. It occurred to her, however, that some tragedy might have taken
place in that particular room, which would explain the reluctance of the
manageress to let them hire it. Not being of a nervous disposition, my
sister thought no more of the matter, and went downstairs to join her
husband.
That night she was awakened by something, she never knew what, but on
opening her eyes she saw a rather disturbing vision. Close to the door
stood the figure of a man, looking straight towards her. His figure was
brilliantly luminous, and stood out clearly and distinctly in the
darkness of the room.
She awakened her husband, who sat up in bed and stared back at the
figure. He saw it as clearly and distinctly as his wife saw it, and for
some considerable time they watched it, until it gradually faded out.
What is so sad is that they did not address this ghost. They had every
opportunity, for at the same hour the same figure appeared the next
night. It never tried to approach them: it simply stood there quietly
for about an hour, and then vanished. Probably it was the wraith of a
suicide. The fact remains that very few people do address the ghosts
they see. Even if they are not afraid, it never seems to occur to seers
that to speak to the disembodied might be a very kind and helpful thing
to do.
On their return home my brother-in-law told this story to some friends
at his Club, and a stranger who was present said that he was aware there
was a haunted room in that Torquay hotel, for he knew some one else who
had seen it.