Produced by Judy Boss
THE SHAPE OF FEAR
AND OTHER GHOSTLY TALES
By Elia Wilkinson Peattie
Original Transcriber's Note:
I have omitted signature indicators and italicization of the
running heads. In addition, I have made the following changes
to the text:
PAGE LINE ORIGINAL CHANGED TO
156 1 where as were as
156 4 mouth mouth.
165 5 Wedgwood Wedgewood
166 9 Wedgwood Wedgewood
167 6 surperfluous superfluous
172 11 every ever
173 17 Bogg Boggs
CONTENTS
THE SHAPE OF FEAR
ON THE NORTHERN ICE
THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST
A SPECTRAL COLLIE
THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE
A CHILD OF THE RAIN
THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT
STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT
THE PIANO NEXT DOOR
AN ASTRAL ONION
FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD
A GRAMMATICAL GHOST
THE SHAPE OF FEAR
TIM O'CONNOR--who was descended from the O'Conors with one N---- started
life as a poet and an enthusiast. His mother had designed him for
the priesthood, and at the age of fifteen, most of his verses had an
ecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other, he got into the newspaper
business instead, and became a pessimistic gentleman, with a literary
style of great beauty and an income of modest proportions. He fell in
with men who talked of art for art's sake,--though what right they had
to speak of art at all nobody knew,--and little by little his view of
life and love became more or less profane. He met a woman who sucked
his heart's blood, and he knew it and made no protest; nay, to the great
amusement of the fellows who talked of art for art's sake, he went the
length of marrying her. He could not in decency explain that he had
the traditions of fine gentlemen behind him and so had to do as he did,
because his friends might not have understood. He laughed at the days
when he had thought of the priesthood, blushed when he ran across any of
those tender and exquisite old verses he had written in his youth,
and became addicted to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and to
gaming a little to escape a madness of ennui.
As the years went by he avoided, with more and more scorn, that part of
the world which he denominated Philistine, and consorted only with the
fellows who flocked about Jim O'Malley's saloon. He was pleased with
solitude, or with these convivial wits, and with not very much else
beside. Jim O'Malley was a sort of Irish poem, set to inspiring measure.
He was, in fact, a Hibernian Mæcenas, who knew better than to put
bad whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a trite tale in the presence
of a wit. The recountal of his disquisitions on politics and other
current matters had enabled no less than three men to acquire national
reputations; and a number of wretches, having gone the way of men who
talk of art for art's sake, and dying in foreign lands, or hospitals,
or asylums, having no one else to be homesick for, had been homesick for
Jim O'Malley, and wept for the sound of his voice and the grasp of his
hearty hand.
When Tim O'Connor turned his back upon most of the things he was born
to and took up with the life which he consistently lived till the
unspeakable end, he was unable to get rid of certain peculiarities. For
example, in spite of all his debauchery, he continued to look like the
Beloved Apostle. Notwithstanding abject friendships he wrote limpid and
noble English. Purity seemed to dog his heels, no matter how violently
he attempted to escape from her. He was never so drunk that he was
not an exquisite, and even his creditors, who had become inured to his
deceptions, confessed it was a privilege to meet so perfect a gentleman.
The creature who held him in bondage, body and soul, actually came to
love him for his gentleness, and for some quality which baffled her,
and made her ache with a strange longing which she could not define.
Not that she ever defined anything, poor little beast! She had skin the
color of pale gold, and yellow eyes with brown lights in them, and great
plaits of straw-colored hair. About her lips was a fatal and sensuous
smile, which, when it got hold of a man's imagination, would not let it
go, but held to it, and mocked it till the day of his death. She was
the incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeliness and the
maternity left out--she was ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joy
or tears or sin.
She took good care of Tim in some ways: fed him well, nursed him back
to reason after a period of hard drinking, saw that he put on overshoes
when the walks were wet, and looked after his money. She even prized his
brain, for she discovered that it was a delicate little machine which
produced gold. By association with him and his friends, she learned that
a number of apparently useless things had value in the eyes of certain
convenient fools, and so she treasured the autographs of distinguished
persons who wrote to him--autographs which he disdainfully tossed in the
waste basket. She was careful with presentation copies from authors, and
she went the length of urging Tim to write a book himself. But at that
he balked.
“Write a book!” he cried to her, his gentle face suddenly white with
passion. “Who am I to commit such a profanation?”
She didn't know what he meant, but she had a theory that it was
dangerous to excite him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook a chop
for him when he came home that night.
He preferred to have her sitting up for him, and he wanted every
electric light in their apartments turned to the full. If, by any
chance, they returned together to a dark house, he would not enter till
she touched the button in the hall, and illuminated the room. Or if it
so happened that the lights were turned off in the night time, and
he awoke to find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the woman came
running to his relief, and, with derisive laughter, turned them on
again. But when she found that after these frights he lay trembling and
white in his bed, she began to be alarmed for the clever, gold-making
little machine, and to renew her assiduities, and to horde more
tenaciously than ever, those valuable curios on which she some day
expected to realize when he was out of the way, and no longer in a
position to object to their barter.
O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among the
boys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, and
yet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius was
entitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they called for
him after work hours, to permit him to reach the lighted corridor before
they turned out the gas over his desk. This, they reasoned, was but a
slight service to perform for the most enchanting beggar in the world.
“Dear fellow,” said Rick Dodson, who loved him, “is it the Devil you
expect to see? And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is not
such a bad old chap.”
“You haven't found him so?”
“Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of the
world and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know what
there is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a few
bad habits--such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yours
madness?--which would be quite to your credit,--for gadzooks, I like a
lunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too much
data on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something more
occult, and therefore more interesting?”
“Rick, boy,” said Tim, “you're too--inquiring!” And he turned to his
desk with a look of delicate hauteur.
It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spent
together talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who,
having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had now
journeyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. The
dawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, the
cigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking of
sociable silence.
“Rick,” he said, “do you know that Fear has a Shape?”
“And so has my nose!”
“You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make my
confession to you. What I fear is Fear.”
“That's because you've drunk too much--or not enough.
“'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling--'”
“My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. But
it's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts.”
“For an agnostic that seems a bit--”
“Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know that
I do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts--no--no things
which shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done--”
“Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, and
jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top.'”
Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and there
was nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawn
showed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed away
the moist hair from his haggard face--that face which would look like
the blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair.
“'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I,'” he murmured drowsily, “'it
is some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night--'”
The words floated off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arose
preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent over
his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation.
“Damned by the skin of his teeth!” he muttered. “A little more, and he
would have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. As
it is”--he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings,
even when they were uttered in soliloquy--“he is merely one of those
splendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell.” Then Dodson had a
momentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, and
stretching himself on his sofa, he, too, slept.
That night he and O'Connor went together to hear “Faust” sung, and
returning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criticism. Except
for the distant clatter of telegraph instruments, or the peremptory
cries of “copy” from an upper room, the office was still. Dodson wrote
and smoked his interminable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head in
his hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence. He did not know when
Dodson finished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing the
lights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands. Dodson gathered
up the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a chair, and
called:
“It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this.”
There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he had
handed his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone, and
returned to the room for his friend. He advanced no further than the
doorway, for, as he stood in the dusky corridor and looked within the
darkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfect
loveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as the
embodiment of all goodness. From it came a soft radiance and a perfume
softer than the wind when “it breathes upon a bank of violets stealing
and giving odor.” Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend.
It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldness
like that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasse
should have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all the
manhood that was left in him, that he was able to restore light to
the room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached poor Tim he was
stone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the woman, who nursed
him out of that attack--and later on worried him into another.
When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and help
himself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting beside
him, said:
“Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, you
sweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?”
“It was the Shape of Fear,” said Tim, quite seriously.
“But it seemed mild as mother's milk.”
“It was compounded of the good I might have done. It is that which I
fear.”
He would explain no more. Later--many months later--he died patiently
and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with
the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things
considered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.
Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.
“Sa, sa!” cried he. “I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What do you
suppose Tim is looking at?”
As for Jim O'Malley, he was with difficulty kept from illuminating the
grave with electricity.
ON THE NORTHERN ICE
THE winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as
the Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to be
white also. Even sound has been included in Nature's arrestment, for,
indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated.
The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not
to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls
the ebon ether in vast, liquid billows.
In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually
peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cain
killed Abel, and as if all of humanity's remainder was huddled in
affright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation.
The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay--bent on a pleasant
duty--he laughed to himself, and said that he did not at all object
to being the only man in the world, so long as the world remained as
unspeakably beautiful as it was when he buckled on his skates and shot
away into the solitude. He was bent on reaching his best friend in time
to act as groomsman, and business had delayed him till time was at its
briefest. So he journeyed by night and journeyed alone, and when the
tang of the frost got at his blood, he felt as a spirited horse feels
when it gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skates
were keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed,
and cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He could
hear the whistling of the air as he cleft it.
As he went on and on in the black stillness, he began to have fancies.
He imagined himself enormously tall--a great Viking of the Northland,
hastening over icy fiords to his love. And that reminded him that he had
a love--though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as a
background for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that she
was his love, for he had seen her only a few times, and the auspicious
occasion had not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, and
was to be the maid of honor to his friend's bride--which was one more
reason why he skated almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now and
then, he let out a shout of exultation.
The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn's sun of expectancy was the
knowledge that Marie Beaujeu's father had money, and that Marie lived in
a house with two stories to it, and wore otter skin about her throat
and little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding.
Moreover, in the locket in which she treasured a bit of her dead
mother's hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea. These things
made it difficult--perhaps impossible--for Ralph Hagadorn to say
more than, “I love you.” But that much he meant to say though he were
scourged with chagrin for his temerity.
This determination grew upon him as he swept along the ice under the
starlight. Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed eager to
reassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of light
which flowed from the love-star, but he was forced to turn his back upon
it and face the black northeast.
It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes were
frosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he thought
it might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes hard, he
made sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater in
fluttering garments who sped over the ice as fast as ever werewolf went.
He called aloud, but there was no answer. He shaped his hands and
trumpeted through them, but the silence was as before--it was complete.
So then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension on
his firm young muscles. But go however he would, the white skater went
faster. After a time, as he glanced at the cold gleam of the north star,
he perceived that he was being led from his direct path. For a moment
he hesitated, wondering if he would not better keep to his road, but his
weird companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweet
to follow, he followed.
Of course it came to him more than once in that strange pursuit, that
the white skater was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men see
curious things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn's own
father--to hark no further than that for an instance!--who lived up
there with the Lake Superior Indians, and worked in the copper mines,
had welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter night, who was gone by
morning, leaving wolf tracks on the snow! Yes, it was so, and John
Fontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day--if he were
alive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were, is melted now!)
Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the ice
flushed pink at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into the cold
heavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. The sun
climbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, and as
Hagadorn took off his skates and glanced carelessly lakeward, he beheld
a great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves showing blue and hungry
between white fields. Had he rushed along his intended path, watching
the stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body at
magnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave.
How wonderful that it had been sweet to follow the white skater, and
that he followed!
His heart beat hard as he hurried to his friend's house. But he
encountered no wedding furore. His friend met him as men meet in houses
of mourning.
“Is this your wedding face?” cried Hagadorn. “Why, man, starved as I am,
I look more like a bridegroom than you!”
“There's no wedding to-day!”
“No wedding! Why, you're not--”
“Marie Beaujeu died last night--”
“Marie--”
“Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she came
home chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in it
somehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of you.”
“Of me?”
“We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers.”
“I didn't know it myself; more's the pity. At least, I didn't know--”
“She said you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the big
breaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and the
rift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in by
the old French creek if you only knew--”
“I came in that way.”
“But how did you come to do that? It's out of the path. We thought
perhaps--”
But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come to
pass.
That day they watched beside the maiden, who lay with tapers at her head
and at her feet, and in the little church the bride who might have been
at her wedding said prayers for her friend. They buried Marie Beaujeu in
her bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was before the altar with her, as he
had intended from the first! Then at midnight the lovers who were to
wed whispered their vows in the gloom of the cold church, and walked
together through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths upon a grave.
Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back again to his home. They wanted
him to go by sunlight, but he had his way, and went when Venus made her
bright path on the ice.
The truth was, he had hoped for the companionship of the white skater.
But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voice
he heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was as
empty and as white as if God had just created it, and the sun had not
yet colored nor man defiled it.
THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST
THE first time one looked at Elsbeth, one was not prepossessed. She was
thin and brown, her nose turned slightly upward, her toes went in just
a perceptible degree, and her hair was perfectly straight. But when one
looked longer, one perceived that she was a charming little creature.
The straight hair was as fine as silk, and hung in funny little braids
down her back; there was not a flaw in her soft brown skin, and her
mouth was tender and shapely. But her particular charm lay in a look
which she habitually had, of seeming to know curious things--such as it
is not allotted to ordinary persons to know. One felt tempted to say to
her:
“What are these beautiful things which you know, and of which others are
ignorant? What is it you see with those wise and pellucid eyes? Why is
it that everybody loves you?”
Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew her better than I knew any
other child in the world. But still I could not truthfully say that I
was familiar with her, for to me her spirit was like a fair and fragrant
road in the midst of which I might walk in peace and joy, but where I
was continually to discover something new. The last time I saw her quite
well and strong was over in the woods where she had gone with her two
little brothers and her nurse to pass the hottest weeks of summer. I
followed her, foolish old creature that I was, just to be near her, for
I needed to dwell where the sweet aroma of her life could reach me.
One morning when I came from my room, limping a little, because I am
not so young as I used to be, and the lake wind works havoc with me, my
little godchild came dancing to me singing:
“Come with me and I'll show you my places, my places, my places!”
Miriam, when she chanted by the Red Sea might have been more exultant,
but she could not have been more bewitching. Of course I knew what
“places” were, because I had once been a little girl myself, but unless
you are acquainted with the real meaning of “places,” it would be
useless to try to explain. Either you know “places” or you do not--just
as you understand the meaning of poetry or you do not. There are things
in the world which cannot be taught.
Elsbeth's two tiny brothers were present, and I took one by each hand
and followed her. No sooner had we got out of doors in the woods than
a sort of mystery fell upon the world and upon us. We were cautioned to
move silently, and we did so, avoiding the crunching of dry twigs.
“The fairies hate noise,” whispered my little godchild, her eyes
narrowing like a cat's.
“I must get my wand first thing I do,” she said in an awed undertone.
“It is useless to try to do anything without a wand.”
The tiny boys were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I felt
that at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies, which
had hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an enchanting moment,
for there appeared, just then, to be nothing commonplace about life.
There was a swale near by, and into this the little girl plunged. I
could see her red straw hat bobbing about among the tall rushes, and I
wondered if there were snakes.
“Do you think there are snakes?” I asked one of the tiny boys.
“If there are,” he said with conviction, “they won't dare hurt her.”
He convinced me. I feared no more. Presently Elsbeth came out of the
swale. In her hand was a brown “cattail,” perfectly full and round. She
carried it as queens carry their sceptres--the beautiful queens we dream
of in our youth.
“Come,” she commanded, and waved the sceptre in a fine manner. So we
followed, each tiny boy gripping my hand tight. We were all three a
trifle awed. Elsbeth led us into a dark underbrush. The branches, as
they flew back in our faces, left them wet with dew. A wee path, made by
the girl's dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes of elderberry and
wild cucumber scented the air. A bird, frightened from its nest, made
frantic cries above our heads. The underbrush thickened. Presently the
gloom of the hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of the shadowy green
a tulip tree flaunted its leaves. Waves boomed and broke upon the
shore below. There was a growing dampness as we went on, treading very
lightly. A little green snake ran coquettishly from us. A fat and glossy
squirrel chattered at us from a safe height, stroking his whiskers with
a complaisant air.
At length we reached the “place.” It was a circle of velvet grass,
bright as the first blades of spring, delicate as fine sea-ferns. The
sunlight, falling down the shaft between the hemlocks, flooded it with
a softened light and made the forest round about look like deep purple
velvet. My little godchild stood in the midst and raised her wand
impressively.
“This is my place,” she said, with a sort of wonderful gladness in her
tone. “This is where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see them?”
“See what?” whispered one tiny boy.
“The fairies.”
There was a silence. The older boy pulled at my skirt.
“Do YOU see them?” he asked, his voice trembling with expectancy.
“Indeed,” I said, “I fear I am too old and wicked to see fairies, and
yet--are their hats red?”
“They are,” laughed my little girl. “Their hats are red, and as
small--as small!” She held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to give
us the correct idea.
“And their shoes are very pointed at the toes?”
“Oh, very pointed!”
“And their garments are green?”
“As green as grass.”
“And they blow little horns?”
“The sweetest little horns!”
“I think I see them,” I cried.
“We think we see them too,” said the tiny boys, laughing in perfect
glee.
“And you hear their horns, don't you?” my little godchild asked somewhat
anxiously.
“Don't we hear their horns?” I asked the tiny boys.
“We think we hear their horns,” they cried. “Don't you think we do?”
“It must be we do,” I said. “Aren't we very, very happy?”
We all laughed softly. Then we kissed each other and Elsbeth led us out,
her wand high in the air.
And so my feet found the lost path to Arcady.
The next day I was called to the Pacific coast, and duty kept me there
till well into December. A few days before the date set for my return to
my home, a letter came from Elsbeth's mother.
“Our little girl is gone into the Unknown,” she wrote--“that Unknown in
which she seemed to be forever trying to pry. We knew she was going, and
we told her. She was quite brave, but she begged us to try some way to
keep her till after Christmas. 'My presents are not finished yet,' she
made moan. 'And I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can't
have a very happy Christmas without me, I should think. Can you arrange
to keep me somehow till after then?' We could not 'arrange' either with
God in heaven or science upon earth, and she is gone.”
She was only my little godchild, and I am an old maid, with no business
fretting over children, but it seemed as if the medium of light and
beauty had been taken from me. Through this crystal soul I had perceived
whatever was loveliest. However, what was, was! I returned to my home
and took up a course of Egyptian history, and determined to concern
myself with nothing this side the Ptolemies.
Her mother has told me how, on Christmas eve, as usual, she and
Elsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung them,
where they had always hung, by the fireplace. They had little heart for
the task, but they had been prodigal that year in their expenditures,
and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures they thought
would appeal to them. They asked themselves how they could have been
so insane previously as to exercise economy at Christmas time, and what
they meant by not getting Elsbeth the autoharp she had asked for the
year before.
“And now--” began her father, thinking of harps. But he could not
complete this sentence, of course, and the two went on passionately and
almost angrily with their task. There were two stockings and two piles
of toys. Two stockings only, and only two piles of toys! Two is very
little!
They went away and left the darkened room, and after a time they
slept--after a long time. Perhaps that was about the time the tiny boys
awoke, and, putting on their little dressing gowns and bed slippers,
made a dash for the room where the Christmas things were always placed.
The older one carried a candle which gave out a feeble light. The other
followed behind through the silent house. They were very impatient and
eager, but when they reached the door of the sitting-room they stopped,
for they saw that another child was before them.
It was a delicate little creature, sitting in her white night gown, with
two rumpled funny braids falling down her back, and she seemed to be
weeping. As they watched, she arose, and putting out one slender
finger as a child does when she counts, she made sure over and over
again--three sad times--that there were only two stockings and two piles
of toys! Only those and no more.
The little figure looked so familiar that the boys started toward it,
but just then, putting up her arm and bowing her face in it, as Elsbeth
had been used to do when she wept or was offended, the little thing
glided away and went out. That's what the boys said. It went out as a
candle goes out.
They ran and woke their parents with the tale, and all the house was
searched in a wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and tumult! But
nothing was found. For nights they watched. But there was only the
silent house. Only the empty rooms. They told the boys they must have
been mistaken. But the boys shook their heads.
“We know our Elsbeth,” said they. “It was our Elsbeth, cryin' 'cause she
hadn't no stockin' an' no toys, and we would have given her all ours,
only she went out--jus' went out!”
Alack!
The next Christmas I helped with the little festival. It was none of
my affair, but I asked to help, and they let me, and when we were all
through there were three stockings and three piles of toys, and in the
largest one was all the things that I could think of that my dear child
would love. I locked the boys' chamber that night, and I slept on the
divan in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but little, and the
night was very still--so windless and white and still that I think I
must have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard none. Had I been in my
grave I think my ears would not have remained more unsaluted.
Yet when daylight came and I went to unlock the boys' bedchamber door,
I saw that the stocking and all the treasures which I had bought for my
little godchild were gone. There was not a vestige of them remaining!
Of course we told the boys nothing. As for me, after dinner I went home
and buried myself once more in my history, and so interested was I that
midnight came without my knowing it. I should not have looked up at all,
I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not been for a faint,
sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed instrument. It was so
delicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but so joyous and tender
that I could not but listen, and when I heard it a second time it seemed
as if I caught the echo of a child's laugh. At first I was puzzled. Then
I remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other things in
that pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:
“Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest. Rest in joy, dear little ghost.
Farewell, farewell.”
That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was always
an obedient little thing.
A SPECTRAL COLLIE
WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home--which
was England--and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of younger sons
do the same, only their destination is not invariably Kansas.
An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the deeds
over to England before Cecil left. He said there was a house on the
place. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as she had
fitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted from him
with an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which she kept to
herself.
The boy bore up the way a man of his blood ought, but when he went out
to the kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to pieces somehow, and
rolled on the grass with her in his arms and wept like a booby. But the
remarkable part of it was that Nita wept too, big, hot dog tears which
her master wiped away. When he went off she howled like a hungry baby,
and had to be switched before she would give any one a night's sleep.
When Cecil got over on his Kansas place he fitted up the shack as
cosily as he could, and learned how to fry bacon and make soda biscuits.
Incidentally, he did farming, and sunk a heap of money, finding out
how not to do things. Meantime, the Americans laughed at him, and were
inclined to turn the cold shoulder, and his compatriots, of whom there
were a number in the county, did not prove to his liking. They consoled
themselves for their exiled state in fashions not in keeping with
Cecil's traditions. His homesickness went deeper than theirs, perhaps,
and American whiskey could not make up for the loss of his English home,
nor flirtations with the gay American village girls quite compensate
him for the loss of his English mother. So he kept to himself and had
nostalgia as some men have consumption.
At length the loneliness got so bad that he had to see some living thing
from home, or make a flunk of it and go back like a cry baby. He had
a stiff pride still, though he sobbed himself to sleep more than one
night, as many a pioneer has done before him. So he wrote home for Nita,
the collie, and got word that she would be sent. Arrangements were made
for her care all along the line, and she was properly boxed and shipped.
As the time drew near for her arrival, Cecil could hardly eat. He
was too excited to apply himself to anything. The day of her expected
arrival he actually got up at five o'clock to clean the house and make
it look as fine as possible for her inspection. Then he hitched up and
drove fifteen miles to get her. The train pulled out just before he
reached the station, so Nita in her box was waiting for him on the
platform. He could see her in a queer way, as one sees the purple centre
of a revolving circle of light; for, to tell the truth, with the long
ride in the morning sun, and the beating of his heart, Cecil was only
about half-conscious of anything. He wanted to yell, but he didn't.
He kept himself in hand and lifted up the sliding side of the box and
called to Nita, and she came out.
But it wasn't the man who fainted, though he might have done so, being
crazy homesick as he was, and half-fed and overworked while he was yet
soft from an easy life. No, it was the dog! She looked at her master's
face, gave one cry of inexpressible joy, and fell over in a real
feminine sort of a faint, and had to be brought to like any other lady,
with camphor and water and a few drops of spirit down her throat. Then
Cecil got up on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him with her head on
his arm, and they rode home in absolute silence, each feeling too much
for speech. After they reached home, however, Cecil showed her all over
the place, and she barked out her ideas in glad sociability.
After that Cecil and Nita were inseparable. She walked beside him
all day when he was out with the cultivator, or when he was mowing or
reaping. She ate beside him at table and slept across his feet at night.
Evenings when he looked over the Graphic from home, or read the books
his mother sent him, that he might keep in touch with the world, Nita
was beside him, patient, but jealous. Then, when he threw his book or
paper down and took her on his knee and looked into her pretty eyes, or
frolicked with her, she fairly laughed with delight.
In short, she was faithful with that faith of which only a dog is
capable--that unquestioning faith to which even the most loving women
never quite attain.
However, Fate was annoyed at this perfect friendship. It didn't give her
enough to do, and Fate is a restless thing with a horrible appetite for
variety. So poor Nita died one day mysteriously, and gave her last
look to Cecil as a matter of course; and he held her paws till the last
moment, as a stanch friend should, and laid her away decently in a pine
box in the cornfield, where he could be shielded from public view if he
chose to go there now and then and sit beside her grave.
He went to bed very lonely, indeed, the first night. The shack seemed
to him to be removed endless miles from the other habitations of men.
He seemed cut off from the world, and ached to hear the cheerful little
barks which Nita had been in the habit of giving him by way of good
night. Her amiable eye with its friendly light was missing, the gay wag
of her tail was gone; all her ridiculous ways, at which he was never
tired of laughing, were things of the past.
He lay down, busy with these thoughts, yet so habituated to Nita's
presence, that when her weight rested upon his feet, as usual, he felt
no surprise. But after a moment it came to him that as she was dead the
weight he felt upon his feet could not be hers. And yet, there it was,
warm and comfortable, cuddling down in the familiar way. He actually
sat up and put his hand down to the foot of the bed to discover what
was there. But there was nothing there, save the weight. And that stayed
with him that night and many nights after.
It happened that Cecil was a fool, as men will be when they are young,
and he worked too hard, and didn't take proper care of himself; and so
it came about that he fell sick with a low fever. He struggled around
for a few days, trying to work it off, but one morning he awoke only to
the consciousness of absurd dreams. He seemed to be on the sea, sailing
for home, and the boat was tossing and pitching in a weary circle, and
could make no headway. His heart was burning with impatience, but the
boat went round and round in that endless circle till he shrieked out
with agony.
The next neighbors were the Taylors, who lived two miles and a half
away. They were awakened that morning by the howling of a dog before
their door. It was a hideous sound and would give them no peace. So
Charlie Taylor got up and opened the door, discovering there an excited
little collie.
“Why, Tom,” he called, “I thought Cecil's collie was dead!”
“She is,” called back Tom.
“No, she ain't neither, for here she is, shakin' like an aspin, and a
beggin' me to go with her. Come out, Tom, and see.”
It was Nita, no denying, and the men, perplexed, followed her to Cecil's
shack, where they found him babbling.
But that was the last of her. Cecil said he never felt her on his
feet again. She had performed her final service for him, he said.
The neighbors tried to laugh at the story at first, but they knew the
Taylors wouldn't take the trouble to lie, and as for Cecil, no one would
have ventured to chaff him.
THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT
BART FLEMING took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when she
was but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in three
hundred and twenty acres of corn and rye. Off toward the west there was
an unbroken sea of tossing corn at that time of the year when the bride
came out, and as her sewing window was on the side of the house which
faced the sunset, she passed a good part of each day looking into that
great rustling mass, breathing in its succulent odors and listening
to its sibilant melody. It was her picture gallery, her opera, her
spectacle, and, being sensible,--or perhaps, being merely happy,--she
made the most of it.
When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had much
entertainment in discovering what lay beyond. The town was east, and it
chanced that she had never ridden west. So, when the rolling hills of
this newly beholden land lifted themselves for her contemplation, and
the harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary glow sank in the veiled
horizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapor wavered up and down
along the earth line, it was as if a new world had been made for her.
Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a whip-lash of purple cloud, full
of electric agility, snapped along the western horizon.
“Oh, you'll see a lot of queer things on these here plains,” her husband
said when she spoke to him of these phenomena. “I guess what you see is
the wind.”
“The wind!” cried Flora. “You can't see the wind, Bart.”
“Now look here, Flora,” returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis, “you're
a smart one, but you don't know all I know about this here country. I've
lived here three mortal years, waitin' for you to git up out of your
mother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there is
to know. Some things out here is queer--so queer folks wouldn't believe
'em unless they saw. An' some's so pig-headed they don't believe their
own eyes. As for th' wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th'
west, you can see it blowin' along near th' ground, like a big ribbon;
an' sometimes it's th' color of air, an' sometimes it's silver an' gold,
an' sometimes, when a storm is comin', it's purple.”
“If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry some
other girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?”
Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in the
last.
“Oh, come on!” protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms and
jumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a little
girl--but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more.
Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothing
interested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, which
lay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be,
because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is high
and the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in which
the sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future.
She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered for
several days about them before she ventured to say anything to Bart
on the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt to
explain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter. Perhaps
Bart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to her,
as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that some
handsome young men might be “baching” it out there by themselves, and
Bart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart had flattered her
so much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, though
as a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot of
reddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a white
face.
“Bart,” she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushed
toward the great black hollow of the west, “who lives over there in that
shack?”
She turned away from the window where she had been looking at the
incarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then,
her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that she
might easily have been mistaken.
“I say, Bart, why don't you speak? If there's any one around to
associate with, I should think you'd let me have the benefit of their
company. It isn't as funny as you think, staying here alone days and
days.”
“You ain't gettin' homesick, be you, sweetheart?” cried Bart, putting
his arms around her. “You ain't gettin' tired of my society, be yeh?”
It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner, but
at length Flora was able to return to her original topic.
“But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?”
“I'm not acquainted with 'em,” said Bart, sharply. “Ain't them biscuits
done, Flora?”
Then, of course, she grew obstinate.
“Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that house,
and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down the road
from there. Some one lives there I know, for in the mornings and at
night I see the smoke coming out of the chimney.”
“Do you now?” cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her with
unfeigned interest. “Well, do you know, sometimes I've fancied I seen
that too?”
“Well, why not,” cried Flora, in half anger. “Why shouldn't you?”
“See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an' listen to me. There ain't
no house there. Hello! I didn't know you'd go for to drop the biscuits.
Wait, I'll help you pick 'em up. By cracky, they're hot, ain't they?
What you puttin' a towel over 'em for? Well, you set down here on my
knee, so. Now you look over at that there house. You see it, don't yeh?
Well, it ain't there! No! I saw it the first week I was out here. I was
jus' half dyin', thinkin' of you an' wonderin' why you didn't
write. That was the time you was mad at me. So I rode over there one
day--lookin' up company, so t' speak--and there wa'n't no house there. I
spent all one Sunday lookin' for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary about
it. He laughed an' got a little white about th' gills, an' he said he
guessed I'd have to look a good while before I found it. He said that
there shack was an ole joke.”
“Why--what--”
“Well, this here is th' story he tol' me. He said a man an' his wife
come out here t' live an' put up that there little place. An' she was
young, you know, an' kind o' skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked on
her an' worked on her, an' one day she up an' killed the baby an' her
husband an' herself. Th' folks found 'em and buried 'em right there on
their own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th' house was burned
down. Don't know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, I
guess it burned!”
“You guess it burned!”
“Well, it ain't there, you know.”
“But if it burned the ashes are there.”
“All right, girlie, they're there then. Now let's have tea.”
This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening,
but that didn't keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn and
stealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went to
the barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood the
little house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger's
back--Ginger being her own yellow broncho--and set off at a hard pace
for the house. It didn't appear to come any nearer, but the objects
which had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Flora
pressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approached
the poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the little
shack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before her
eyes.
She slapped Ginger's flanks and kept him going, and she at last got him
up to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew tall
and rank and in the midst of it lay a baby's shoe. Flora thought of
picking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then she
grew angry, and set Ginger's head toward the place and tried to drive
him over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gathered
himself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for home
as only a broncho can.
STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE
VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoys
his work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of the
picturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, in
Canada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoe
through the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and no
dreamer. He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up a
winning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all day
and not worry about it to-morrow.
Wherever he goes, he carries a camera.
“The world,” Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with him
when he smokes his pipe, “was created in six days to be photographed.
Man--and particularly woman--was made for the same purpose. Clouds
are not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade. They have been
created in order to give the camera obscura something to do.”
In short, Virgil Hoyt's view of the world is whimsical, and he likes to
be bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysterious. That
is the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning to
photograph a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him, but above all,
he doesn't like the necessity of shouldering, even for a few moments, a
part of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one else. He dislikes
sorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred miles up the cold
Canadian rivers to get rid of it. Nevertheless, as assistant
photographer, it is often his duty to do this very kind of thing.
Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish family to photograph the
remains of the mother, who had just died. He was put out, but he was
only an assistant, and he went. He was taken to the front parlor, where
the dead woman lay in her coffin. It was evident to him that there was
some excitement in the household, and that a discussion was going on.
But Hoyt said to himself that it didn't concern him, and he therefore
paid no attention to it.