Kelvin, not I, is responsible for this story, which he told me
sitting smoking by his study window.
It was a squalid night, I remember, wet and fretful—the sort of night
which seems to sojourners in the deep country (as we then were) to
bring rumours of plashy pavements, and the roar of rain-sodden
traffic, and the wailing and blaspheming of women lost and crying out
of a great darkness. No knowledge of our rural isolation could allay
this haunting impression in my mind that night. I felt ill at ease,
and, for some reason, out of suits with life. It mattered nothing that
a belt of wild woodland separated us from the country station five
miles away. That, after all, by the noises in it, might have been a
very causeway, by which innumerable spectres were hurrying home from
their business in the distant cities. The dark clouds, as long as we
could see them labouring from the south, appeared freighted with the
very burden of congregated dreariness. They glided up, like vast
electric tramcars, and seemed to pause overhead, as if to discharge
into the sanctuary of our quiet pastures their loads of aggressive
vulgarity. My nerves were all jangled into disorder, I fear, and
inclining me to imaginative hyperbole.
Kelvin, for his part, was very quiet. He was a conundrum, that man.
Once the keenest of sportsmen, he was now for years become an almost
sentimental humanitarian—and illogical, of necessity. He would not
consent to kill under any circumstances—wilfully, that is to say; but
he enjoyed his mutton with the best of us. However, I am not
quarrelling with his point of view. He, for one—by his own admission,
anyhow—owed a life to “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,” and
he would not, from the date of his debt, cross her prerogatives. The
same occasion, it appeared, had opened in him an unstanchable vein of
superstition, which was wont to gush—bloodily, I might say—in
depressing seasons of the mind. It provoked me, on the evening of the
present anecdote, to a sort of peevish protest.
“Why the devil,” I said, “are spectral manifestations—at least,
according to you fellows—everlastingly morbid and ugly? Are there no
gentle disembodied things, who, of their love and pity, would be
rather more anxious than the wicked, one would think, to communicate
with their survivors?”
“Of course,” said Kelvin; “but their brief sweet little reassurances
pass unnoticed. Their forms are insignificant, their voices
inarticulate; they can only appeal by symbol, desperately clinging to
the earth the while. On the other hand, the world tethers its
worldlings by the foot, so that they cannot take flight when they
will. There remains, so to speak, too much earth in their composition,
and it keeps ’em subject to the laws of gravitation.”