In the spirit I saw a strange pastime not long ago; but I did not know
or guess the nature of the entertainment. At first it seemed no more
than a big cricket-match, with all the world looking on and humanity
playing against its enemies. But as I looked again, I perceived
that the audience was a thing of shadows, a mighty, misty crowd of
ghosts--those who had played each their innings, and now watched the
Game of Life and the living play it.
’Twas a single-wicket game, and a mighty balcony overlooked the field
of play. Recording Angels scored, Time umpired, Death bowled tirelessly
and unchanged through the ages occupied by the Game of Life; but the
fielders moved and came and went like a demon-dance. Vile red and black
things were they, the very outcome of delirium as it seemed; and now
one rose into hideous prominence, and Cholera or Small-pox snapped ten
thousand players, and sent men, women, children to the shades; and now
another showed deadly activity, as War or Sudden Death made havoc with
the batsmen. A hideous crew they were, all tentacles and hydra-heads;
they thronged the earth and the air around each player, and no stroke
seemed safely out of their reach.
Consumption kept the wicket, and caught or stumped cruel numbers of
promising players before they were well set; Fever stood at mid-on;
Cancer fielded deep and fielded sure; Heart Disease was at point;
Apoplexy at cover-point; and all the other fell things that rob man of
life stood round--a seething, twisting mob of black and scarlet devils
leapt out of a nightmare or a picture by Salvator Rosa.
Few batsmen were clean bowled, but many were run out and still more
caught. Now and then, however, Death found his way to the wicket after
a long innings, and sometimes an old man who had long defied the
hungry field went down to the Grey Bowler himself. If a child came in,
Croup and Scarlet Fever, and Whooping-Cough and Measles crept up to
the wicket. Diphtheria was a deadly customer to the children, and at
such times Death made an Englishman feel angry, for he bowled harder
at the little ones than their stouter elders. But it has been pretty
generally admitted, I believe, that Death, whatever else he may be, is
no sportsman.
Despite their claws and fangs, their million eyes and million hands,
the red fielders and the black missed a good few chances, whereat Death
grinned. His average never troubled him; he knew it must come out well
enough in the long run. Often a batsman profited not a little when thus
let off, and many an innings was a treat to watch in its patience and
skill, while others, on the contrary--most of them, in fact--wearied
the spectator by their feebleness. Sometimes a ghostly roar greeted
the fall of a wicket; usually great indifference marked the event; not
seldom the onlookers manifested absolute relief.
Full of monstrous surprises is this game. The weakling defies Death for
over after over, and gets the ball past all the claws and long arms to
the boundary; the stout and brawny giant, who looks good for a century,
tumbles pitifully into the first trap, and puts up a ball weakly to
Rheumatic Fever or Pneumonia, as though he had forgotten that such
fielders existed for him.
The Recording Angels suffered me to glance over some score-sheets,
and I found them very interesting and astonishing reading; for in the
Game of Life, unlike most games, it is not the spectator who can best
judge of a man’s innings. It needs a recorder possessed of power more
than human to score correctly. I found, for instance, that not a few
batsmen who had played a very showy innings and kept up their wickets
well, and afforded the crowd plenty of entertainment, had in reality
added little or nothing to the Score of the World. Of course, in the
Game of Life every ball counts; but the peculiarity of it is that a man
may put on runs against himself. Every stroke is recorded in one of the
score-books. There are two, but these never tally.
And then, in the spirit still, I found that my turn had come, and
the great circle of grey spectators stretched round me and I walked
forth alone to play my innings. Now the aspect of affairs was mightily
changed for me. The fielders in their liveries of blood or ebony had
all quite vanished away; Death himself had dwindled into a mere remote
shadow; and as the ball came, it rolled so feebly and so weakly that
I laughed and smote it, and marvelled that such bowling had ever
proved difficult to anybody. I performed with confidence; I hit hard;
I surprised myself and seemed to be playing a glorious game; but no
applause reached me; the grey ghosts all had their backs turned; for
many a time had they seen great innings played; and mine offered no
shadow of interest to anybody but myself. Presently Death bowled a
little straighter; but now I had got a good sight of the ball, and it
seemed as big as a balloon, and I felt I could do what I liked with it.
Suddenly, however, a delivery broke in, as I tried to cut it, and out
of the invisible there started a livid monster, and stretched a huge
hand that darkened all the sky. My heart grew cold, and my head sank
between my shoulders, and I glared at the loathsome thing thus suddenly
loosed upon me in my secure hour. For a moment the onlookers were
interested; then a murmur like the wind in a winter wood ran amongst
them, for the ball was dropped, and the hideous fielder again vanished.
I had come back to my innings by a short cut, and, settling down once
more, I played with a caution new to me, for I could never again forget
the invisible terror waiting so close.
But this Game of Life grows harder and harder as a man keeps up his
wicket. The bowling, so easy at first, increases in difficulty. To get
the ball away is more and more arduous; the light grows bad so quickly;
and a man is often hit by the ball towards the end and robbed of his
nerve and courage. Those deathly charnel things in the field, too,
creep nearer and nearer at the finish, and when once a man sees them
waiting--waiting, watching, whispering--he knows he can score no more,
and that the duration of his innings is now but a question for Death
and Time.
In the gathering darkness I stood, and the ball was lost, for I could
neither time it nor even see it any more. And I knew that I was not
playing with a straight bat. Then a murmur of many voices rang in my
ear, a sound of waters flowing, and a sensation of such weariness as
only the dying know. Finally, there came a ball of terrible swiftness
to me, and it struck the shoulder of my feeble bat and went into the
darkness. Then followed the sound of hands upon it and of remote
laughter; so I knew that my innings was ended. I strained to see what
fiend had caught me; I yearned to know my score and in which book it
should be found. But I could do none of these things, for Death, whose
voice I had never heard until now, cried: “How’s that, Umpire?” And
Time answered, “Out!”
“ALAS! POOR GHOST”
It is quite enough in this materialistic age that I say I am a ghost to
make people turn up their noses at me; and when I add that I am a very
second-rate spirit with the most mean spectral privileges, it will be
readily gathered that my position in phantom circles is more or less a
painful one.
To be plain, I am not an awe-inspiring apparition in any sense; I
am not even passable; I never raised the hair or froze the blood of
anybody; adults gaze unmoved at my most fearsome manifestations;
children like me.
But I am a right ghost for all that. Time and space possess no
significance for me, and hundreds of people have mistaken me for
luminous paint after dark. Against these advantages, however, must be
set the unhappy conditions of smallness and stoutness; for as in life I
was of diminutive and plump habit, so do I now remain. I am, in fact,
a short, fat ghost--a combination of qualities that promised from the
first to be fatal to any spectral procedure on a high plane.
Thus, though I have haunted in all the best middle-class families,
and once or twice taken a _locum tenens_ among county people; though
I have foretold deaths, indicated buried treasure, pointed out secret
staircases, corpses and so forth; though I have gone through the
regular mill, my spirit has yet failed of acquiring even a reasonable
reputation among men.
For the past fifty years I have dwelt in Herefordshire with some
pleasant, self-made folks who suit me very well. Capon Hall is a very
roomy mansion, possessing architectural advantages from my point of
view, and situated in a somewhat densely-haunted district. The original
owners got themselves destroyed in the time of Charles I., and the
property, after many fluctuations of fortune, was ultimately purchased
by Mr. John Smithson, a Manchester man. Here he resided, developed
into a good old Squire of the right sort, and grew popular. He was a
widower, and had two children, Ethel, a girl of eighteen, who lived
with him, and William, a son of two or three and twenty, who entered
the army and went to India. This youth married, became the father of a
daughter, and sent the infant home to Capon Hall. Now, love may often
appear where there is no respect, and when an element of real human
affection entered into my ghostly life, I found it a comfortable and
pleasing thing.
This baby Smithson loved me, and her regard was returned. Our
attachment must be allowed platonic to a degree perhaps never before
imagined, for Winifred has just attained to the age of three years,
while I am above three hundred. She is a golden-haired, sunny little
soul, making all the music and laughter of her home. I am an old, grey
ghost, to whom the western wing of Capon Hall has for fifty years been
consecrated.
With an accident to the Squire’s daughter, Miss Ethel Smithson, upon
some occasion of fox-hunting, this narrative properly begins. She
suffered an awkward tumble, and the young man who came to her aid had
the good fortune to please the girl immensely. Squire Smithson, upon
the narration of Mr. Talbot Warren’s bravery, could not for the life of
him see anything to make a fuss about. “If a woman falls into a ditch,
is it asking much of the man nearest at the time to pull her out?” he
inquired. But Miss Ethel explained that the circumstances were of a
very terrific nature, and how her hero, not content with seeing that
she was safe and sound, had foregone all further sport, sacrificed
his day’s pleasure, and insisted on riding with her to the nearest
farmhouse.
She met Mr. Warren again soon afterwards, and continued to find
peculiar pleasure in his society; while, finally, through mutual
friends, the young man secured an invitation to Capon Hall for a week’s
hunting.
He and his horse arrived. He proved uninteresting, and a sportsman of
mean capabilities; but Ethel Smithson, blind to the youth’s colourless
and negative nature, fell violently in love with him. Being, moreover,
a wilful little soul, who did pretty much what she liked with a most
indulgent parent, matters went nearly all her own way from the first.
But the Squire and Mr. Warren had nothing in common, and at times their
manifold differences of opinion might have produced serious results
save for the younger man’s caution. Talbot’s physical nerve was weak,
he wanted pluck--a lack that Mr. Smithson quickly discovered, and made
the boy’s life a burden to him.
Ethel always supported the weaker side in the many arguments arising
from this question of bravery; and, on one occasion, after the Squire
had made some allusions more pointed than polite to his guest’s rapidly
acquired knowledge of gaps, gates and like aids to the judicious
Nimrod, Miss Smithson thought proper to drag me into the conversation.
“How can the wild, reckless courage you admire, papa, compare with the
cool mental nerve which may be shown to some purpose in the useful
affairs of life? How many of the men who jump over hedges and ditches,
and risk their stupid necks before the gaze of farm yokels, would sleep
night after night in a haunted room, for instance, as Mr. Warren does
here?”
“Our ghost!” roared the Squire. “Our little plump, roly-poly of a
ghost! I’d make a better bogey with a sheet and a turnip!”
The man meant nothing; his remark was not intended offensively; but I
chanced to be in the drawing-room at the time (on a little footstool
by the fire), and I confess I felt hurt. People should be careful what
they say in a haunted house. I have a friend doing some haunting about
half a mile from here, who would come over and punish these folks
horribly if I wished it. He belongs to the Reformation period, works
between three and four in the morning, and during that weird hour can
make a noise like china falling down a lift. But I am not vindictive.
A phantom rarely reaches the age of three hundred without learning to
control his temper.
“Physical bravery may be shown to greater advantage than in the
hunting-field,” said Mr. Warren, answering the Squire.
“It may, I grant you, but that is a right good school for it; and a man
who loses nerve at a critical moment there will, in my judgment, be
likely to do so all through his life.”
“Are there no brave men who do not hunt?” asked Ethel.
“Thousands, my dear. You give us a beautiful feminine example of
begging the question,” answered the parent. “Moral nerve is, I allow,
a greater thing than physical bravery at its best; but courage of both
kinds, according to my old-fashioned notions, should be the hall-mark
of a man.”
Talbot expressed a hope that some opportunity might, ere long, be given
him.
“I trust a chance of showing you that I do not lack either one sort of
bravery or the other will come in my way, Mr. Smithson,” said he.
Then the company retired, and on the following day private business
took Mr. Warren to Hereford for an hour or two. He returned, however,
before luncheon; and that night transpired the monstrous event I am
now about to relate. Although he slept in an apartment particularly
associated with myself, I had not, I may here explain, vouchsafed
an interview to our visitor, for reasons sufficiently sound. In my
opinion, no good would have come of it. Mentally, Talbot Warren was
not a coward; and the knowledge of this fact, combined with a certain
underbred cubbishness in the young man’s treatment of inferiors, led
me to suspect something derogatory to myself did I appear to him; but,
after the recent conversation, I felt I had no choice.
As the clock struck twelve, therefore, on the night in question, I
made my way through the wash-hand stand in the Russet Room and stood
before Talbot Warren. I am nothing by gaslight, and to my surprise and
irritation Warren’s gas still burnt. He was dressed and sitting by the
fire examining a huge lethal weapon with two barrels. He looked up and
caught my wan, weary eyes fixed upon him.
“Oh, you’re the ghost, I suppose?” he said rather carelessly.
I approached him and endeavoured to touch his brow with my icy
forefinger; but he arose from his chair, regarded me insolently, and--I
hate to write it--walked straight through me. I was never so put out in
my life. I should have hardly conceived such a thing to be possible; I
nearly choked with indignation. For sheer, unadulterated vulgarity, the
man who intentionally walks through a ghost may fairly be said to stand
alone. You tangible, ponderable people who read cannot remotely imagine
my feelings; but any spectre will. Revenge was my one idea.
Having by this outrage convinced himself of my unsubstantial nature,
the little cad looked me up and down critically and contemptuously.
“Then,” said he, “_you_ can’t upset my plans, anyhow.”
The knowledge that he had plans comforted me somewhat. That they were
nefarious I gathered from the pistol which he carried; and that I would
confound and outwit him at all costs I also determined.
Not until two in the morning did he prepare for action. Meantime,
rendering myself wholly invisible, I sat on a chest of drawers and
watched him. At the hour named he shut his book, partially unrobed, put
on his slippers, produced a “jemmy” and a dark lantern, picked up his
weapon, and silently crawled downstairs.
The hideous truth flashed upon me. He was one of some gang of burglars,
and now intended throwing open the house to his accomplices! What was
to be done? Our household lay buried in sleep. Warren stole to the
butler’s room. Once within it, a stroke or two from his detestable
apparatus would put the plate at his mercy.
For one brief moment I lost my nerve. The responsibility of my position
was terrible. Then I strung myself to the struggle, and attacked
him. But in spite of my frantic gesticulations, aerial gyrations,
and supernatural manifestations, the ruffian kept on his evil way
unmoved. I dashed about, and tried hard to make him get excited and
worried, but he was as cool as a cucumber, and told me to “keep my hair
on”--whatever that might mean. Then, realising the futility of this
course, I sped away, faster than thought, to alarm the house.
Squire Smithson was slumbering noisily on his right side as I loomed
through the fireplace of his chamber and laid an icy digit upon his
brow. He leapt up instantly, but laughed when he saw who it was.
“Hullo, Fatty! Feeling lonely, eh? Don’t worry me, my boy; I’ve got a
busy day before me to-morrow. Stick to your own room, and get a rise
out of that booby Warren. If you can’t frighten him, you’d better give
up the business and go back where you came from.”
Then he turned with his face to the wall, and was asleep again
instantly. That is the world all over. You may be breaking your heart
about it; but it only laughs, and tells you to mind your own business,
and not make a fool of yourself.
I went and woke the butler. I waved my drapery and pointed downstairs
with actions that spoke louder than words. He sat up in bed and forgot
himself altogether, and used language I shall not soil this page by
repeating. It appeared that he was suffering from gout--the result of
dishonesty in the wine-cellar--and had only managed to get to sleep a
few moments before I roused him.
“’Ere ’ave I bin torn to pieces with agony for three mortal hours, and
just drop off, and then you come with your beastly cold paw and wake me
and bring back the torture a thousand times worse than ever. I’ll give
warning; I won’t put up with you and your tomfoolery for any master
alive. Why should I? Get out of this room, you little brute. Don’t
stand there waving about, like a shirt on a clothes-line. Get on, get
out of it, or I’ll strangle you.”
I went. It was no good stopping. He couldn’t strangle me, of course;
but it is impossible to explain a difficult thing like burglary, in
pantomime, to a man who can hardly see straight for temper. I almost
wept ghostly tears. Never before had the pathos and powerlessness of my
position been so impressed upon me.
In this sorry plight I sought my little friend Winifred, the Squire’s
grand-daughter before mentioned. She was lying wide awake, silent and
speculative, as small children will. I loomed through a screen, covered
with pictures from Christmas numbers, and she arose from her cot, a
wee, comical white figure, faintly illumined by a night-light.
“How is you, dear doast?” she inquired. My mystic presence always
gratified her.
She chuckled and chirruped in baby fashion while I beckoned and moved
towards the door.
“You funny old doast. Stand on ’oo little head, doast, like yesterday
in de torridor.”
But I wasn’t there to fool. I wanted to get her out into the passage,
then alarm her nurse and so the entire house.
“It’s too told to do playing to-night, doast,” she said.
“Cold!” I doubt if ever a phantom got up to such a temperature anywhere
as I did on that occasion.
Then the nurse awoke, peeped two angry eyes over her counterpane, and
gave me some plainly-worded advice.
“Shame on you, ghost! Ain’t you got nothing better to do than scare
childer and wake decent women-folks? Be off with you, you fat old
blackguard, or it’s a bell, book and candle I’ll fetch.”