THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories (15 page)

The words that I was about to utter died upon my lips, and a strange horror—a dreadful horror—came upon me. My sight had by this time become used to the gloom of the coach, and I could see with tolerable distinctness. I turned to my opposite neighbour. He, too, was looking at me, with the same startling pallor in his face, and the same stony glitter in his eyes. I passed my hand across my brow. I turned to the passenger on the seat beside my own, and saw—oh Heaven! how shall I describe what I saw? I saw that he was no living man—that none of them were living men, like myself! A pale phosphorescent light—the light of putrefaction—played upon their awful faces; upon their hair, dank with the dews of the grave; upon their clothes, earth-stained and dropping to pieces; upon their hands, which were as the hands of corpses long buried. Only their eyes, their terrible eyes, were living; and those eyes were all turned menacingly upon me!

A shriek of terror, a wild unintelligible cry for help and mercy, burst from my lips as I flung myself against the door, and strove in vain to open it.

In that single instant, brief and vivid as a landscape beheld in the flash of summer lightning, I saw the moon shining down through a rift of stormy cloud—the ghastly sign-post rearing its warning finger by the wayside—the broken parapet—the plunging horses—the black gulf below. Then, the coach reeled like a ship at sea. Then, came a mighty crash—a sense of crushing pain—and then, darkness.

It seemed as if years had gone by when I awoke one morning from a deep sleep, and found my wife watching by my bedside. I will pass over the scene that ensued, and give you, in half a dozen words, the tale she told me with tears of thanksgiving. I had fallen over a precipice, close against the junction of the old coach-road and the new, and had only been saved from certain death by lighting upon a deep snowdrift that had accumulated at the foot of the rock beneath. In this snowdrift I was discovered at daybreak, by a couple of shepherds, who carried me to the nearest shelter, and brought a surgeon to my aid. The surgeon found me in a state of raving delirium, with a broken arm and a compound fracture of the skull. The letters in my pocket-book showed my name and address; my wife was summoned to nurse me; and, thanks to youth and a fine constitution, I came out of danger at last. The place of my fall, I need scarcely say, was precisely that at which a frightful accident had happened to the north mail nine years before.

I never told my wife the fearful events which I have just related to you. I told the surgeon who attended me; but he treated the whole adventure as a mere dream born of the fever in my brain. We discussed the question over and over again, until we found that we could discuss it with temper no longer, and then we dropped it. Others may form what conclusions they please—I
know
that twenty years ago I was the fourth inside passenger in that Phantom Coach.

The Recollections of Professor Henneberg

‘THERE ARE REMEMBRANCES for which no philosophy will account —sensations for which experience can discover no parallel. Few persons will hesitate to confess to you that they have beheld scenes and faces which were new and yet familiar; of which they seemed to have dreamed in time gone by; and which, without any apparent cause, produced a painfully intimate impression upon their minds. I myself have dreamed of a place, and again forgotten that dream. Years have passed away, and the dream has returned to me, unaltered in the minutest particular. I have at last come suddenly upon the scene in some wild land which I had never visited before, and have recognised it, tree for tree, field for field, as I had beheld it in my dream. Then the dream and the scene became one in my mind, and by that union I learned to wrest from Nature a portion of one of her obscurest secrets. What are these phenomena? Whence these fragmentary recollections which seem to establish a mysterious link between death and sleep? What is death? What is sleep? It is a law of the philosophy of mind that we can think of nothing which we have not perceived. The induction is, that we have perceived these things; but not, perhaps, in our present state of being.’

‘You believe, then, in the doctrine of pre-existence!’ I exclaimed, pushing back my chair, and looking my guest earnestly in the face.

‘I believe in the immortality of the soul,’ replied the Professor with unmoved solemnity. ‘I feel that I am, and that I have been. Eternity is a circle—you reduce it to a crescent, if you deny the previous half of its immensity. For the soul there is, properly speaking, neither past nor future. It is
now
and eternal. You profess to believe in the immortality of the soul, and in the same breath advance an opinion which, if submitted to a due investigation, would establish a totally adverse system. If this soul of yours be immortal, it must have existed from all time. If not, what guarantee have you that it will continue to be during all time to come? That which shall have no end can have no beginning. It is a part of God, and partakes of His nature. To be born is the same as to die—both are transitionary; not creative or final. Life is but a vesture of the Soul, and as often as we die, we but change one vesture for another.’

‘But this is the theory of the metempsychosis!’ I said, smiling. ‘You have studied the philosophy of Oriental literature till you have yourself become a believer in the religion of Bramah!’

‘All tradition,’ said the Professor, ‘is a type of spiritual truth. The superstitions of the East, and the mythologies of the North—the beautiful Fables of old Greece, and the bold investigations of modern science—all tend to elucidate the same principles; all take their root in those promptings and questionings which are innate in the brain and heart of man. Plato believed that the soul was immortal, and born frequently; that it knew all things; and that what we call learning is but the effort which it makes to recall the wisdom of the Past. “For to search and to learn,” said the poet-philosopher, “is reminiscence all.” At the bottom of every religious theory, however wild and savage, lies a perception—dim perhaps, and distorted, but still a perception—of God and immortality.’

‘And you think that we have all lived before, and all shall live again?’

‘I know it,’ replied the professor. ‘My life has been one long succession of these revelations; and I am persuaded that if we would compel the mind to a severe contemplation of itself—if we would resolutely study the phenomena of psychology as developed within the limits of our own consciousness—we might all arrive at the recognition of this mystery of pre-existence. The “caverns of the mind” are obscure, but not impenetrable; and all who have courage may follow their labyrinthine windings to the light of truth beyond.’

Two days after this conversation I left Leipzig for Frankfurt. Just as I was taking my seat in the diligence, a man wearing the livery of a college messenger, made his appearance at the window. He was breathless with running, and held a small parcel in his hand.

‘What is this?’ I asked, as he handed it to me.

‘From Professor Henneberg,’ he replied. He was proceeding to say more, but the diligence gave a lurch, and rolled heavily forward; the messenger sprang back; the postillions cracked their whips; and in a moment we were clattering over the rough pavement of the town.

There were but two passengers in the interior, beside myself. One was a priest, who did nothing but sleep and read his breviary, and who was perfumed, moreover, with a strong scent of garlic. The other was a young German student, who sat with his head hanging outside the window, smoking cigars.

As I did not find either of my companions particularly prepossessing, and as I had forgotten to furnish my pockets with any literature more entertaining than
Murray’s Handbook of South Germany
, I was agreeably surprised, on opening the packet, to discover a considerable number of pages in my learned friend’s very peculiar handwriting, neatly tied together at the corners, and accompanied by a note, in which he gave me to understand that the MS contained a brief sketch of some passages in his life which he thought might interest me, and which were, moreover, illustrative of that doctrine of pre-existence respecting which we had been conversing a few evenings before.

These papers I have taken the liberty of styling:

THE RECOLLECTIONS OF PROFESSOR HENNEBERG

My parents resided in Dresden, where I was born on the evening of the fourth of May, 1790.

My mother died before I was many hours in being, and I was sent out to nurse at a farmhouse in the immediate neighbourhood of the city. I cannot say that I have any distinct remembrance of the first few years that ushered in this present life with which I am endued. I was kindly treated. I grew in the fields and the sun, like a young plant. My father came regularly every Sunday and Thursday to see me; and I learned to look upon the Frau Schleitz as my mother. When I had reached the age of ten years I was removed to a large public school in Dresden.

Up to this time I had received no education whatever. I was as ignorant as a babe of two years old. I therefore entered the academy at a period when I was just of an age to be painfully conscious of my inferiority to boys considerably my juniors. Undoubtedly my father did me a great injustice by thus delaying to furnish my young mind with that intellectual nutriment which is as essential to our mental being as wine and meat to our physical nature; but he was eccentric, arbitrary, and a visionary. It was one of his favourite theories that early childhood should be sacred from the anxieties of learning, and devoted wholly to the acquisition of bodily health; that youth should be appropriated to study; that manhood should be passed in action; and that old age should enjoy repose. Into these four epochs he would have had the lives of all mankind divided; forgetting that between stages so opposite there could exist no harmony of disposition or unity of purpose. Had he been an absolute monarch, he would have compelled his subjects to conform to these regulations. As he was only a German merchant, and possessed entire control over but one creature in the world, he practised his system at my expense.

For the first month or two I suffered acutely. I found myself pitied by the masters and despised by the boys. The latter excluded me from their sports and openly derided my ignorance. When I stood up to repeat my task, I stood where, five minutes before, boys younger than myself had been reading aloud from Tacitus and Herodotus. When I strove to acquire the rudiments of arithmetic, it was in a room where the least advanced scholar was already occupied upon the problems of Euclid.

To a proud nature such as mine, this state of degradation was intolerable. Though sometimes almost overborne by shame and anguish, I made superhuman efforts to regain the time which had been lost. I was speedily rewarded for my exertions. My progress was astonishing; and, though still far behind the rest, the rapidity with which I mastered all that was given me to learn, and, indeed, the manner in which I frequently anticipated the instructions of the tutors, became the marvel of the school.

My father was wealthy and supplied me liberally with money. This money I devoted wholly to the purchase of books. When the other boys were playing in the grounds of the academy, I used to steal away to the deserted bedchambers, or to my accustomed corner in the empty classroom, and there labour earnestly at the acquisition of some of those branches of learning into which I had been but lately inducted, or at which, in the regular course of study, I had not yet arrived. Thus, too, in the morning, before any of my companions were awake, I would draw a volume from beneath my pillow, or tax my memory to recall all the information which I had gathered during the previous day. By these means I not only continued to add hourly to my store, but I forgot nothing that I had once made my own.

And now let me confess something connected with my progress —something upon which I have often reflected with sensations approaching to terror—something which I have since attempted to analyse, and which has guided me to the interpretation of that mystery in which my subsequent life has been enveloped.

Nothing that I learned was entirely new to
me
.

Yes, strange and awful as it may appear, I never read a book which did not seem as if it had once been familiar to me. All knowledge vibrated in my soul like the echo of a familiar voice. When my teacher was elucidating a problem, or explaining some of the phenomena of science, I invariably outstripped the sense of his argument, and, taking the words from his mouth, would sometimes leap at the conclusion before he had well begun. Many times he has started, questioned me, accused me of previously studying the book; and always I have proved to him that it had never been for an instant in my possession.

I thus obtained a character for natural powers of reasoning which I could not refute, and yet which I felt were undeserved. It was by no internal ratiocination that I arrived at the knowledge which so surprised, not only my instructors, but myself. The faculty was spontaneous. I had no control over it. It came with all the sudden clearness of conviction, and illumined the subject at once, like a gleam of lightning. I was bewildered sometimes to find how intimately the workings of this comprehension resembled the unsought promptings of memory.

However, I was at this time too young to enter minutely upon so difficult an investigation as that of the operations of the mind, and my thoughts were already charged with undertakings almost beyond their powers. I was therefore content to accept my good fortune without questioning its sources too curiously.

Five years elapsed. During that time I had passed from the lowest bench to the rank of senior scholar at the academy; I had mastered two of the living languages (English and French) besides my own; I was tolerably well-read in the classics; I had gone through the entire routine of school mathematics; and I was the author of an anonymous volume on Social Philosophy.

At this point of my education, my father, in compliance with my earnest solicitations, transferred me to the University of Leipzig, where I had scarcely entered my name when I received intelligence of his sudden death. My grief was deep and sincere, and the only result of wealth was to augment my love of knowledge, and to increase the severity of my studies.

I now directed my attention principally towards Oriental languages and Oriental literature. I lived the life of a hermit. I existed only in the past. I avoided the abstractions of the outer world; and devoted myself entirely to the acquisition of Hebrew, Persian, Hindoo, and Indian learning.

In college, as at school, my efforts were followed by the same rapid and unvarying success. I bore away the prize at every public examination, and finally received the highest university honours. Still I had no inclination to leave Leipzig. I continued to occupy my old apartments, to prosecute my old studies, and to lead precisely the same life as heretofore. Thus six years more were added to my term of existence; and at twenty-one years of age, on the death of one of my own instructors, I was by unanimous election inducted into the vacant professorship of Oriental literature.

This unparalleled progress surprised no one so much as myself, for I alone knew the extraordinary manner in which it was accomplished. Knowledge came to me more as a revelation than a study—yet the word revelation is inadequate to express my meaning.
Memory
, I repeat—
memory
is the only mental process resembling that to which I owed my success.