But Meriline had turned from me in utter forgetfulness, and was saying
over and over, with joy in her uplifted face, "Thy will be done! Thy
will be done!"
"Truly," I said to myself, as I passed along the line, "he who worships
the Father as the Self of the beloved has already acquired a soul."
A GHOST[6]
BY LAFCADIO HEARN
[Footnote 6: From _Karma_ (Boni & Liveright).]
I
Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may
pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than
likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, whose
wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasure,
but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being--the man whose
inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of
a society to which he belongs only by accident. However intellectually
trained, he must always remain the slave of singular impulses which have
no rational source, and which will often amaze him no less by their
mastering power than by their continuous savage opposition to his every
material interest. These may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral
habit--be explained by self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps
they may not,--in which event the victim can only surmise himself the
_Imago_ of some pre-existent larval aspiration--the full development of
desires long dormant in a chain of more limited lives.
Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the class, take
infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to environment--the line
of least resistance for one being that of greatest resistance for
another; no two courses of true nomadism can ever be wholly the same.
Diversified of necessity both impulse and direction, even as human
nature is diversified! Never since consciousness of time began were two
beings born who possessed exactly the same quality of voice, the same
precise degree of nervous impressibility, or, in brief, the same
combination of those viewless force-storing molecules which shape and
poise themselves in sentient substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to
particularize the curious psychology of such existences; at the very
utmost it is possible only to describe such impulses and preceptions of
nomadism as lie within the very small range of one's own observation.
And whatever in these is strictly personal can have little interest or
value except in so far as it holds something in common with the great
general experience of restless lives. To such experience may belong, I
think, one ultimate result of all those irrational partings,
self-wrecking, sudden isolations, abrupt severances from all attachment,
which form the history of the nomad--the knowledge that a strong silence
is ever deepening and expanding about one's life, and that in that
silence there are ghosts.
II
Oh! the first vague charm, the first sunny illusion of some fair
city, when vistas of unknown streets all seem leading to the
realization of a hope you dare not even whisper; when even the shadows
look beautiful, and strange facades appear to smile good omen through
light of gold! And those first winning relations with men, while you are
still a stranger, and only the better and the brighter side of their
nature is turned to you! All is yet a delightful, luminous
indefiniteness--sensation of streets and of men--like some beautifully
tinted photograph slightly out of focus.
Then the slow solid sharpening of details all about you, thrusting
through illusion and dispelling it, growing keener and harder day by day
through long dull seasons; while your feet learn to remember all
asperities of pavements, and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings and
of persons--failures of masonry, furrowed lines of pain. Thereafter only
the aching of monotony intolerable, and the hatred of sameness grown
dismal, and dread of the merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly
repetition of things; while those impulses of unrest, which are Nature's
urgings through that ancestral experience which lives in each one of
us--outcries of sea and peak and sky to man--ever make wilder appeal.
Strong friendships may have been formed; but there finally comes a day
when even these can give no consolation for the pain of monotony, and
you feel that in order to live you must decide, regardless of result, to
shake forever from your feet the familiar dust of that place.
And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or
steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the
old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment--not as
if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if
pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may come
to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a friend misapprehended
and unjustly judged. But you will never more see those streets--except
in dreams.
Through sleep only they will open again before you, steeped in the
illusive vagueness of the first long-past day, peopled only by friends
outstretching to you. Soundlessly you will tread those shadowy pavements
many times, to knock in thought, perhaps, at doors which the dead will
open to you. But with the passing of years all becomes dim--so dim that
even asleep you know 'tis only a ghost-city, with streets going to
nowhere. And finally whatever is left of it becomes confused and blended
with cloudy memories of other cities--one endless bewilderment of filmy
architecture in which nothing is distinctly recognizable, though the
whole gives the sensation of having been seen before, ever so long ago.
* * * * *
Meantime, in the course of wanderings more or less aimless, there has
slowly grown upon you a suspicion of being haunted--so frequently does a
certain hazy presence intrude itself upon the visual memory. This,
however, appears to gain rather than to lose in definiteness; with each
return its visibility seems to increase. And the suspicion that you may
be haunted gradually develops into a certainty.
III
You are haunted--whether your way lie through the brown gloom of London
winter, or the azure splendor of an equatorial day--whether your steps
be tracked in snows, or in the burning black sand of a tropic
beach--whether you rest beneath the swart shade of Northern pines, or
under spidery umbrages of palm--you are haunted ever and everywhere by a
certain gentle presence. There is nothing fearsome in this haunting--the
gentlest face, the kindliest voice--oddly familiar and distinct, though
feeble as the hum of a bee.
But it tantalizes--this haunting--like those sudden surprises of
sensation _within_ us, though seemingly not _of_ us, which some dreamers
have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances, recollections of
preexistence. Vainly you ask yourself, "Whose voice? Whose face?" It is
neither young nor old, the Face; it has a vapory indefinableness that
leaves it a riddle; its diaphaneity reveals no particular tint; perhaps
you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard. But its
expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling--like the smiling of
unknown friends in dreams, with infinite indulgence for any folly, even
a dream-folly. Except in that you cannot permanently banish it, the
presence offers no positive resistance to your will; it accepts each
caprice with obedience; it meets your every whim with angelic patience.
It is never critical, never makes plaint even by a look, never proves
irksome; yet you cannot ignore it, because of a certain queer power it
possesses to make something stir and quiver in your heart--like an old
vague sweet regret--something buried alive which will not die. And so
often does this happen that desire to solve the riddle becomes a pain;
that you finally find yourself making supplication to the Presence;
addressing to it questions which it will never answer directly, but
only by a smile or by words having no relation to the asking--words
enigmatic, which make mysterious agitation in old forsaken fields of
memory, even as a wind betimes, over wide wastes of marsh, sets all the
grasses whispering about nothing. But you will question on, untiringly,
through the nights and days of years:
"Who are you? What are you? What is this weird relation that you bear to
me? All you say to me I feel that I have heard before, but where? But
when? By what name am I to call you, since you will answer to none that
I remember? Surely you do not live; yet I know the sleeping-places of
all my dead, and yours I do not know! Neither are you any dream--for
dreams distort and change; and you, you are ever the same. Nor are you
any hallucination; for all my senses are still vivid and strong. This
only I know beyond doubt--that you are of the Past; you belong to
memory--but to the memory of what dead suns?"
* * * * *
Then, some day or night, unexpectedly, there comes to you at least, with
a soft swift tingling shock as of fingers invisible, the knowledge that
the Face is not the memory of any one face; but a multiple image formed
of the traits of many dear faces, superimposed by remembrance, and
interblended by affection into one ghostly personality--infinitely
sympathetic, phantasmally beautiful--a Composite of recollections! And
the Voice is the echo of no one voice, but the echoing of many voices,
molten into a single utterance, a single impossible tone, thin through
remoteness of time, but inexpressibly caressing.
IV
Thou most gentle Composite!--thou nameless and exquisite Unreality,
thrilled into semblance of being from out the sum of all lost
sympathies!--thou Ghost of all dear vanished things, with thy vain
appeal of eyes that looked for my coming, and vague faint pleading of
voices against oblivion, and thin electric touch of buried hands--must
thou pass away forever with my passing, even as the Shadow that I cast,
O thou Shadowing of Souls?
I am not sure. For there comes to me this dream--that if aught in human
life hold power to pass, like a swerved sunray through interstellar
spaces, into the infinite mystery, to send one sweet strong vibration
through immemorial Time, might not some luminous future be peopled with
such as thou? And in so far as that which makes for us the subtlest
charm of being can lend one choral note to the Symphony of the
Unknowable Purpose--in so much might there not endure also to greet
thee, another Composite One--embodying, indeed, the comeliness of many
lives, yet keeping likewise some visible memory of all that may have
been gracious in this thy friend?
THE EYES OF THE PANTHER[7]
BY AMBROSE BIERCE
[Footnote 7: From "_In the Midst of Life_" (Boni & Liveright).]
I
ONE DOES NOT ALWAYS MARRY WHEN INSANE
A man and a woman--nature had done the grouping--sat on a rustic seat,
in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with
the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate--a man at whom
one would look again. The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with
something in her figure and movements suggesting the word "lithe." She
was habited in a gray gown with odd brown markings in the texture. She
may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied
attention to all else. They were gray-green, long and narrow, with an
expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were
disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.
The man and the woman talked.
"Yes," said the woman, "I love you, God knows! But marry you, no. I
cannot, will not."
"Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a
reason. I've a right to know, to understand, to feel and prove my
fortitude if I have it. Give me a reason."
"For loving you?"
The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor. That did not
stir any sense of humor in the man.
"No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I've a
right to know. I must know. I will know!"
He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his
face a frown--it might have been called a scowl. He looked as if he
might attempt to learn by strangling her. She smiled no more--merely sat
looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly
without emotion or sentiment. Yet it had something in it that tamed his
resentment and made him shiver.
"You are determined to have my reason?" she asked in a tone that was
entirely mechanical--a tone that might have been her look made audible.
"If you please--if I'm not asking too much."
Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion
over his co-creature.
"Very well, you shall know: I am insane."
The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought
to be amused. But, again, the sense of humor failed him in his need and
despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did
not believe. Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good
understanding.
"That is what the physicians would say," the woman continued, "if they
knew. I might myself prefer to call it a case of 'possession.' Sit down
and hear what I have to say."
The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the
wayside. Over against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills
were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that
peculiar quality that foretells the twilight. Something of its
mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man's
mood. In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages
of night. Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of
the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes
always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story
told by Irene Marlowe. In deference to the reader's possible prejudice
against the artless method of an unpracticed historian the author
ventures to substitute his own version for hers.
II
A ROOM MAY BE TOO NARROW FOR THREE, THOUGH ONE IS OUTSIDE
In a little log house containing a single room sparely and rudely
furnished, crouching on the floor against one of the walls, was a woman,
clasping to her breast a child. Outside, a dense unbroken forest
extended for many miles in every direction. This was at night and the
room was black dark; no human eye could have discerned the woman and the
child. Yet they were observed, narrowly, vigilantly, with never even a
momentary slackening of attention; and that is the pivotal fact upon
which this narrative turns.
Charles Marlowe was of the class, now extinct in this country, of
woodmen pioneers--men who found their most acceptable surroundings in
sylvan solitudes that stretched along the eastern slope of the
Mississippi Valley, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. For more
than a hundred years these men pushed ever westward, generation after
generation, with rifle and ax, reclaiming from Nature and her savage
children here and there an isolated acreage for the plow, no sooner
reclaimed than surrendered to their less venturesome but more thrifty
successors. At last they burst through the edge of the forest into the
open country and vanished as if they had fallen over a cliff. The
woodman pioneer is no more; the pioneer of the plains--he whose easy
task it was to subdue for occupancy two-thirds of the country in a
single generation--is another and inferior creation. With Charles
Marlowe in the wilderness, sharing the dangers, hardships and privations
of that strange unprofitable life, were his wife and child, to whom, in
the manner of his class in which the domestic virtues were a religion,
he was passionately attached. The woman was still young enough to be
comely, new enough to the awful isolation of her lot to be cheerful. By
withholding the large capacity for happiness which the simple
satisfactions of the forest life could not have filled, Heaven had dealt
honorably with her. In her light household tasks, her child, her husband
and her few foolish books, she found abundant provision for her needs.
One morning in midsummer Marlowe took down his rifle from the wooden
hooks on the wall and signified his intention of getting game.
"We've meat enough," said the wife; "please don't go out to-day. I
dreamed last night, O, such a dreadful thing! I cannot recollect it, but
I'm almost sure that it will come to pass if you go out."
It is painful to confess that Marlowe received this solemn statement
with less of gravity than was due to the mysterious nature of the
calamity foreshadowed. In truth, he laughed.
"Try to remember," he said. "Maybe you dreamed that Baby had lost the
power of speech."
The conjecture was obviously suggested by the fact that Baby, clinging
to the fringe of his hunting-coat with all her ten pudgy thumbs, was at
that moment uttering her sense of the situation in a series of exultant
goo-goos inspired by sight of her father's raccoon-skin cap.
The woman yielded: lacking the gift of humor she could not hold out
against his kindly badinage. So, with a kiss for the mother and a kiss
for the child, he left the house and closed the door upon his happiness
forever.
At nightfall he had not returned. The woman prepared supper and waited.
Then she put Baby to bed and sang softly to her until she slept. By this
time the fire on the hearth, at which she had cooked supper, had burned
out and the room was lighted by a single candle. This she afterward
placed in the open window as a sign and welcome to the hunter if he
should approach from that side. She had thoughtfully closed and barred
the door against such wild animals as might prefer it to an open
window--of the habits of beasts of prey in entering a house uninvited
she was not advised, though with true female prevision she may have
considered the possibility of their entrance by way of the chimney. As
the night wore on she became not less anxious, but more drowsy, and at
last rested her arms upon the bed by the child and her head upon the
arms. The candle in the window burned down to the socket, sputtered and
flared a moment and went out unobserved; for the woman slept and
dreamed.
In her dreams she sat beside the cradle of a second child. The first one
was dead. The father was dead. The home in the forest was lost and the
dwelling in which she lived was unfamiliar. There were heavy oaken
doors, always closed, and outside the windows, fastened into the thick
stone walls, were iron bars, obviously (so she thought) a provision
against Indians. All this she noted with an infinite self-pity, but
without surprise--an emotion unknown in dreams. The child in the cradle
was invisible under its coverlet which something impelled her to remove.
She did so, disclosing the face of a wild animal! In the shock of this
dreadful revelation the dreamer awoke, trembling in the darkness of her
cabin in the wood.
As a sense of her actual surroundings came slowly back to her she felt
for the child that was not a dream, and assured herself by its breathing
that all was well with it; nor could she forbear to pass a hand lightly
across its face. Then, moved by some impulse for which she probably
could not have accounted, she rose and took the sleeping babe in her
arms, holding it close against her breast. The head of the child's cot
was against the wall to which the woman now turned her back as she
stood. Lifting her eyes she saw two bright objects starring the darkness
with a reddish-green glow. She took them to be two coals on the hearth,
but with her returning sense of direction came the disquieting
consciousness that they were not in that quarter of the room, moreover
were too high, being nearly at the level of the eyes--of her own eyes.
For these were the eyes of a panther.
The beast was at the open window directly opposite and not five paces
away. Nothing but those terrible eyes was visible, but in the dreadful
tumult of her feelings as the situation disclosed itself to her
understanding she somehow knew that the animal was standing on its
hinder feet, supporting itself with its paws on the window-ledge. That
signified a malign interest--not the mere gratification of an indolent
curiosity. The consciousness of the attitude was an added horror,
accentuating the menace of those awful eyes, in whose steadfast fire her
strength and courage were alike consumed. Under their silent questioning
she shuddered and turned sick. Her knees failed her, and by degrees,
instinctively striving to avoid a sudden movement that might bring the
beast upon her, she sank to the floor, crouched against the wall and
tried to shield the babe with her trembling body without withdrawing her
gaze from the luminous orbs that were killing her. No thought of her
husband came to her in her agony--no hope nor suggestion of rescue or
escape. Her capacity for thought and feeling had narrowed to the
dimensions of a single emotion--fear of the animal's spring, of the
impact of its body, the buffeting of its great arms, the feel of its
teeth in her throat, the mangling of her babe. Motionless now and in
absolute silence, she awaited her doom, the moments growing to hours, to
years, to ages; and still those devilish eyes maintained their watch.
* * * * *
Returning to his cabin late at night with a deer on his shoulders
Charles Marlowe tried the door. It did not yield. He knocked; there was
no answer. He laid down his deer and went around to the window. As he
turned the angle of the building he fancied he heard a sound as of
stealthy footfalls and a rustling in the undergrowth of the forest, but
they were too slight for certainty, even to his practiced ear.
Approaching the window, and to his surprise finding it open, he threw
his leg over the sill and entered. All was darkness and silence. He
groped his way to the fire-place, struck a match and lit a candle. Then
he looked about. Cowering on the floor against a wall was his wife,
clasping his child. As he sprang toward her she rose and broke into
laughter, long, loud, and mechanical, devoid of gladness and devoid of
sense--the laughter that is not out of keeping with the clanking of a
chain. Hardly knowing what he did he extended his arms. She laid the
babe in them. It was dead--pressed to death in its mother's embrace.
III
THE THEORY OF THE DEFENSE
That is what occurred during a night in a forest, but not all of it did
Irene Marlowe relate to Jenner Brading; not all of it was known to her.
When she had concluded the sun was below the horizon and the long
summer twilight had begun to deepen in the hollows of the land. For some
moments Brading was silent, expecting the narrative to be carried
forward to some definite connection with the conversation introducing
it; but the narrator was as silent as he, her face averted, her hands
clasping and unclasping themselves as they lay in her lap, with a
singular suggestion of an activity independent of her will.
"It is a sad, a terrible story," said Brading at last, "but I do not
understand. You call Charles Marlowe father; that I know. That he is old
before his time, broken by some great sorrow, I have seen, or thought I
saw. But, pardon me, you said that you--that you--"
"That I am insane," said the girl, without a movement of head or body.
"But, Irene, you say--please, dear, do not look away from me--you say
that the child was dead, not demented."
"Yes, that one--I am the second. I was born three months after that
night, my mother being mercifully permitted to lay down her life in
giving me mine."
Brading was again silent; he was a trifle dazed and could not at once
think of the right thing to say. Her face was still turned away. In his
embarrassment he reached impulsively toward the hands that lay closing
and unclosing in her lap, but something--he could not have said
what--restrained him. He then remembered, vaguely, that he had never
altogether cared to take her hand.
"Is it likely," she resumed, "that a person born under such
circumstances is like others--is what you call sane?"