Twelve Stories and a Dream (11 page)

"I could see him wince. 'Boo-oo,' he said.

"'Boo—be hanged! Are you a member?' I said; and just to show I didn't
care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light
my candle. 'Are you a member?' I repeated, looking at him sideways.

"He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became
crestfallen. 'No,' he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of
my eye; 'I'm not a member—I'm a ghost.'

"'Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there any
one you want to see, or anything of that sort?' and doing it as steadily
as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness of whisky
for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned on him,
holding it. 'What are you doing here?' I said.

"He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood,
abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man. 'I'm
haunting,' he said.

"'You haven't any business to,' I said in a quiet voice.

"'I'm a ghost,' he said, as if in defence.

"'That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This is a
respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids and
children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor little
mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits. I suppose
you didn't think of that?'

"'No, sir,' he said, 'I didn't.'

"'You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have you?
Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'

"'None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled—'

"'That's NO excuse.' I regarded him firmly. 'Your coming here is a
mistake,' I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see
if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly. 'If I were you I
wouldn't wait for cock-crow—I'd vanish right away.'

"He looked embarrassed. 'The fact IS, sir—' he began.

"'I'd vanish,' I said, driving it home.

"'The fact is, sir, that—somehow—I can't.'

"'You CAN'T?'

"'No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging about
here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty
bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come haunting
before, and it seems to put me out.'

"'Put you out?'

"'Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't come off.
There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get back.'

"That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an
abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the high,
hectoring vein I had adopted. 'That's queer,' I said, and as I spoke I
fancied I heard some one moving about down below. 'Come into my room and
tell me more about it,' I said. 'I didn't, of course, understand this,'
and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course, you might as well
have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my number,
I think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms—it was lucky I
was the only soul in that wing—until I saw my traps. 'Here we are,' I
said, and sat down in the arm-chair; 'sit down and tell me all about it.
It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward position, old
chap.'

"Well, he said he wouldn't sit down! he'd prefer to flit up and down the
room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little
while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you know,
something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me, and I began
to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird business it was
that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent—the proper conventional
phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of a voice—flitting to
and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old bedroom. You could see
the gleam of the copper candlesticks through him, and the lights on the
brass fender, and the corners of the framed engravings on the wall,—and
there he was telling me all about this wretched little life of his that
had recently ended on earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you
know, but being transparent, of course, he couldn't avoid telling the
truth."

"Eh?" said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

"What?" said Clayton.

"Being transparent—couldn't avoid telling the truth—I don't see it,"
said Wish.

"
I
don't see it," said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. "But it IS
so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's
breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed—he
went down into a London basement with a candle to look for a leakage
of gas—and described himself as a senior English master in a London
private school when that release occurred."

"Poor wretch!" said I.

"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked
of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been
anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too
nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he
said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had never
had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations. 'It's
like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the
examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.' Engaged to be
married of course—to another over-sensitive person, I suppose—when the
indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. 'And where are you
now?' I asked. 'Not in—?'

"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was
of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls too
non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue.
I
don't
know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give me any clear
idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the Other Side
of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in with a set of
kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men, who were on a footing
of Christian names, and among these there was certainly a lot of talk
about 'going haunting' and things like that. Yes—going haunting! They
seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous adventure, and most of them
funked it all the time. And so primed, you know, he had come."

"But really!" said Wish to the fire.

"These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly.
"I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was
the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down,
with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched self, and
never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner
and sillier and more pointless than if he had been real and alive. Only
then, you know, he would not have been in my bedroom here—if he HAD
been alive. I should have kicked him out."

"Of course," said Evans, "there ARE poor mortals like that."

"And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of
us," I admitted.

"What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did
seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of
haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be
a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was,
nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself
an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that
he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a
perfect mess of—and through all the wastes of eternity he never
would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps—. He paused at that, and stood
regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody,
not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now.
I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him
off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend,
the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings,
ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't
you brood on these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do
is to get out of this get out of this—sharp. You pull yourself together
and TRY.' 'I can't,' he said. 'You try,' I said, and try he did."

"Try!" said Sanderson. "HOW?"

"Passes," said Clayton.

"Passes?"

"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how
he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a
business I had!"

"But how could ANY series of passes—?" I began.

"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis
on certain words, "you want EVERYTHING clear.
I
don't know HOW. All
I know is that you DO—that HE did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful
time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."

"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"

"Yes," said Clayton, and seemed to think. "It was tremendously queer,"
he said. "There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent
room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night
town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made when
he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the
dressing-table alight, that was all—sometimes one or other would flare
up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a space. And queer things
happened. 'I can't,' he said; 'I shall never—!' And suddenly he sat
down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.
Lord! what a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!

"'You pull yourself together,' I said, and tried to pat him on the back,
and... my confounded hand went through him! By that time, you know,
I wasn't nearly so—massive as I had been on the landing. I got the
queerness of it full. I remember snatching back my hand out of him, as
it were, with a little thrill, and walking over to the dressing-table.
'You pull yourself together,' I said to him, 'and try.' And in order to
encourage and help him I began to try as well."

"What!" said Sanderson, "the passes?"

"Yes, the passes."

"But—" I said, moved by an idea that eluded me for a space.

"This is interesting," said Sanderson, with his finger in his pipe-bowl.
"You mean to say this ghost of yours gave away—"

"Did his level best to give away the whole confounded barrier? YES."

"He didn't," said Wish; "he couldn't. Or you'd have gone there too."

"That's precisely it," I said, finding my elusive idea put into words
for me.

"That IS precisely it," said Clayton, with thoughtful eyes upon the
fire.

For just a little while there was silence.

"And at last he did it?" said Sanderson.

"At last he did it. I had to keep him up to it hard, but he did it at
last—rather suddenly. He despaired, we had a scene, and then he got up
abruptly and asked me to go through the whole performance, slowly, so
that he might see. 'I believe,' he said, 'if I could SEE I should spot
what was wrong at once.' And he did. '
I
know,' he said. 'What do you
know?' said I. '
I
know,' he repeated. Then he said, peevishly, 'I
CAN'T do it if you look at me—I really CAN'T; it's been that, partly,
all along. I'm such a nervous fellow that you put me out.' Well, we had
a bit of an argument. Naturally I wanted to see; but he was as obstinate
as a mule, and suddenly I had come over as tired as a dog—he tired me
out. 'All right,' I said, '
I
won't look at you,' and turned towards
the mirror, on the wardrobe, by the bed.

"He started off very fast. I tried to follow him by looking in the
looking-glass, to see just what it was had hung. Round went his arms
and his hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush came to the last
gesture of all—you stand erect and open out your arms—and so, don't
you know, he stood. And then he didn't! He didn't! He wasn't! I wheeled
round from the looking-glass to him. There was nothing, I was alone,
with the flaring candles and a staggering mind. What had happened? Had
anything happened? Had I been dreaming?... And then, with an absurd note
of finality about it, the clock upon the landing discovered the moment
was ripe for striking ONE. So!—Ping! And I was as grave and sober as
a judge, with all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast serene.
Feeling queer, you know—confoundedly QUEER! Queer! Good Lord!"

He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. "That's all that happened," he
said.

"And then you went to bed?" asked Evans.

"What else was there to do?"

I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton's voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.

"And about these passes?" said Sanderson.

"I believe I could do them now."

"Oh!" said Sanderson, and produced a penknife and set himself to grub
the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.

"Why don't you do them now?" said Sanderson, shutting his pen-knife with
a click.

"That's what I'm going to do," said Clayton.

"They won't work," said Evans.

"If they do—" I suggested.

"You know, I'd rather you didn't," said Wish, stretching out his legs.

"Why?" asked Evans.

"I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

"But he hasn't got 'em right," said Sanderson, plugging too much tobacco
in his pipe.

"All the same, I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through those
gestures was like mocking a serious matter. "But you don't believe—?"
I said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the fire, weighing
something in his mind. "I do—more than half, anyhow, I do," said Wish.

"Clayton," said I, "you're too good a liar for us. Most of it was all
right. But that disappearance... happened to be convincing. Tell us,
it's a tale of cock and bull."