On a certain day I received a letter from a private soldier, named
Gratmar, attached to the garrison of San Francisco. I had known him but
slightly, the acquaintance having come about through his interest in
some stories which I had published, and which he had a way of calling
"psychological studies." He was a dreamy, romantic, fine-grained lad,
proud as a tiger-lily and sensitive as a blue-bell. What mad caprice
led him to join the army I never knew; but I did know that there he was
wretchedly out of place, and I foresaw that his rude and repellant
environment would make of him in time a deserter, or a suicide, or a
murderer. The letter at first seemed a wild outpouring of despair, for
it informed me that before it should reach me its author would be dead
by his own hand. But when I had read farther I understood its spirit,
and realized how coolly formed a scheme it disclosed and how terrible
its purport was intended to be. The worst of the contents was the
information that a certain officer (whom he named) had driven him to
the deed, and that _he was committing suicide for the sole purpose of
gaining thereby the power to revenge himself upon his enemy_! I
learned afterward that the officer had received a similar letter.
This was so puzzling that I sat down to reflect upon the young man's
peculiarities. He had always seemed somewhat uncanny, and had I proved
more sympathetic he doubtless would have gone farther and told me of
certain problems which he professed to have solved concerning the life
beyond this. One thing that he had said came back vividly: "If I could
only overcome that purely gross and animal love of life that makes us
all shun death, I would kill myself, for I know how far more powerful I
could be in spirit than in flesh."
The manner of the suicide was startling, and that was what might have
been expected from this odd character. Evidently scorning the flummery
of funerals, he had gone into a little canyon near the military
reservation and blown himself into a million fragments with dynamite,
so that all of him that was ever found was some minute particles of
flesh and bone.
I kept the letter a secret, for I desired to observe the officer
without rousing his suspicion of my purpose; it would be an admirable
test of a dead man's power and deliberate intention to haunt the
living, for so I interpreted the letter. The officer thus to be
punished was an oldish man, short, apoplectic, overbearing, and
irascible. Generally he was kind to most of the men in a way; but he
was gross and mean, and that explained sufficiently his harsh treatment
of young Gratmar, whom he could not understand, and his efforts to
break that flighty young man's spirit.
Not very long after the suicide certain modifications in the officer's
conduct became apparent to my watchful oversight. His choler, though
none the less sporadic, developed a quality which had some of the
characteristics of senility; and yet he was still in his prime, and
passed for a sound man. He was a bachelor, and had lived always alone;
but presently he began to shirk solitude at night and court it in
daylight. His brother-officers chaffed him, and thereupon he would
laugh in rather a forced and silly fashion, quite different from the
ordinary way with him, and would sometimes, on these occasions, blush
so violently that his face would become almost purple. His soldierly
alertness and sternness relaxed surprisingly at some times and at
others were exaggerated into unnecessary acerbity, his conduct in this
regard suggesting that of a drunken man who knows that he is drunk and
who now and then makes a brave effort to appear sober. All these
things, and more, indicating some mental strain, or some dreadful
apprehension, or perhaps something worse than either, were observed
partly by me and partly by an intelligent officer whose watch upon the
man had been secured by me.
To be more particular, the afflicted man was observed often to start
suddenly and in alarm, look quickly round, and make some unintelligent
monosyllabic answer, seemingly to an inaudible question that no visible
person had asked. He acquired the reputation, too, of having taken
lately to nightmares, for in the middle of the night he would shriek in
the most dreadful fashion, alarming his roommates prodigiously. After
these attacks he would sit up in bed, his ruddy face devoid of color,
his eyes glassy and shining, his breathing broken with gasps, and his
body wet with a cold perspiration.
Knowledge of these developments and transformations spread throughout
the garrison; but the few (mostly women) who dared to express sympathy
or suggest a tonic encountered so violent rebuffs that they blessed
Heaven for escaping alive from his word-volleys. Even the garrison
surgeon, who had a kindly manner, and the commanding general, who was
constructed on dignified and impressive lines, received little thanks
for their solicitude. Clearly the doughty old officer, who had fought
like a bulldog in two wars and a hundred battles, was suffering deeply
from some undiscoverable malady.
The next extraordinary thing which he did was to visit one evening (not
so clandestinely as to escape my watch) a spirit medium--extraordinary,
because he always had scoffed at the idea of spirit communications. I
saw him as he was leaving the medium's rooms. His face was purple, his
eyes were bulging and terrified, and he tottered in his walk. A
policeman, seeing his distress, advanced to assist him; whereupon the
soldier hoarsely begged,--
"Call a hack."
Into it he fell, and asked to be driven to his quarters. I hastily
ascended to the medium's rooms, and found her lying unconscious on the
floor. Soon, with my aid, she recalled her wits, but her conscious
state was even more alarming than the other. At first she regarded me
with terror, and cried,--
"It is horrible for you to hound him so!"