Ghost Stories

by Bill Bowers

  “What do you mean by ‘such an attitude towards Nature’?” asked Darcy.

  “I can’t explain that; but by translating it into a bodily attitude it is this.”

  Frank sat up for a moment quite straight in his chair, then slowly sunk back with arms outspread and head drooped.

  “That,” he said, “an effortless attitude, but open, resting, receptive. It is just that which you must do with your soul.”

  Then he sat up again.

  “One word more,” he said, “and I will bore you no further. Nor unless you ask me questions shall I talk about it again. You will find me, in fact, quite sane in my mode of life. Birds and beasts you will see behaving somewhat intimately to me, like that moor-hen, but that is all. I will walk with you, ride with you, play golf with you, and talk with you on any subject you like. But I wanted you on the threshold to know what has happened to me. And one more thing will happen.”

  He paused again, and a slight look of fear crossed his eyes.

  “There will be a final revelation,” he said, “a complete and blinding stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full knowledge, the full realization and comprehension that I am one, just as you are, with life. In reality there is no ‘me,’ no ‘you,’ no ‘it.’ Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life. I know that that is so, but the realization of it is not yet mine. But it will be, and on that day, so I take it, I shall see Pan. It may mean death, the death of my body, that is, but I don’t care. It may mean immortal, eternal life lived here and now and forever. Then having gained that, ah, my dear Darcy, I shall preach such a gospel of joy, showing myself as the living proof of the truth, that Puritanism, the dismal religion of sour faces, shall vanish like a breath of smoke, and be dispersed and disappear in the sunlit air. But first the full knowledge must be mine.”

  Darcy watched his face narrowly.

  “You are afraid of that moment,” he said.

  Frank smiled at him.

  “Quite true; you are quick to have seen that. But when it comes I hope I shall not be afraid.”

  For some little time there was silence; then Darcy rose.

  “You have bewitched me, you extraordinary boy,” he said. “You have been telling me a fairy-story, and I find myself saying, ‘Promise me it is true.’”

  “I promise you that,” said the other.

  “And I know I shan’t sleep,” added Darcy.

  Frank looked at him with a sort of mild wonder as if he scarcely understood.

  “Well, what does that matter?” he said.

  “I assure you it does. I am wretched unless I sleep.”

  “Of course I can make you sleep if I want,” said Frank in a rather bored voice.

  “Well, do.”

  “Very good; go to bed. I’ll come upstairs in ten minutes.”

  Frank busied himself for a little after the other had gone, moving the table back under the awning of the veranda and quenching the lamp. Then he went with his quick silent tread upstairs and into Darcy’s room. The latter was already in bed, but very wide-eyed and wakeful, and Frank with an amused smile of indulgence, as for a fretful child, sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “Look at me,” he said, and Darcy looked.

  “The birds are sleeping in the brake,” said Frank softly, “and the winds are asleep. The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its breast. The stars swing low, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens, and—”

  He stopped suddenly, gently blew out Darcy’s candle, and left him sleeping.

  Morning brought to Darcy a flood of hard commonsense, as clear and crisp as the sunshine that filled his room. Slowly as he woke he gathered together the broken threads of the memories of the evening which had ended, so he told himself, in a trick of common hypnotism. That accounted for it all; the whole strange talk he had had was under a spell of suggestion from the extraordinary vivid boy who had once been a man; all his own excitement, his acceptance of the incredible had been merely the effect of a stronger, more potent will imposed on his own. How strong that will was, he guessed from his own instantaneous obedience to Frank’s suggestion of sleep. And armed with impenetrable commonsense he came down to breakfast. Frank had already begun, and was consuming a large plateful of porridge and milk with the most prosaic and healthy appetite.

  “Slept well?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course. Where did you learn hypnotism?”

  “By the side of the river.”

  “You talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night,” remarked Darcy, in a voice prickly with reason.

  “Rather. I felt quite giddy. Look, I remembered to order a dreadful daily paper for you. You can read about money markets or politics or cricket matches.”

  Darcy looked at him closely. In the morning light Frank looked even fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the sight of him somehow dinted Darcy’s armor of commonsense.

  “You are the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw,” he said. “I want to ask you some more questions.”

  “Ask away,” said Frank.

  For the next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions, objections, and criticisms on the theory of life and gradually got out of him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief then, Frank believed that “by lying naked,” as he put it, to the force which controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a way hitherto undreamed of in possessing himself of the essential principle of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in closer union with the great power itself which caused all life to be, the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human beings, just as it existed in trees and animals; to realize and make living to himself that fact that it was all one, was his sole aim and object.

  Here perhaps Darcy would put in a word of warning.

  “Take care,” he said. “To see Pan meant death, did it not?”

  Frank’s eyebrows would rise at this.

  “What does that matter?” he said. “True, the Greeks were always right, and they said so, but there is another possibility. For the nearer I get to it, the more living, the more vital and young I become.”

  “What then do you expect the final revelation will do for you?”

  “I have told you,” said he. “It will make me immortal.”

  But it was not so much from the speech and argument that Darcy grew to grasp his friend’s conception, as from the ordinary conduct of his life. They were passing, for instance, one morning down the village street, when an old woman, very bent and decrepit, but with an extraordinary cheerfulness of face, hobbled out of her cottage. Frank instantly stopped when he saw her.

  “You old darling! How goes it all?” he said.

  But she did not answer, her dim old eyes were riveted on his face; she seemed to drink in like a thirsty creature the beautiful radiance which shone there. Suddenly she put her two withered old hands on his shoulders.

  “You’re just the sunshine itself,” she said, and he kissed her and passed on.

  But scarcely a hundred yards further a strange contradiction of such tenderness occurred. A child running along the path towards them fell on its face, and set up a dismal cry of fright and pain. A look of horror came into Frank’s eyes, and, putting his fingers in his ears, he fled at full speed down the street, and did not pause till he was out of hearing. Darcy, having ascertained that the child was not really hurt, followed him in bewilderment.

  “Are you without pity then?” he asked.

  Frank shook his head impatiently.

  “Can’t you see?” he asked. “Can’t you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely throws me back, retards the com
ing of the great hour! Perhaps when it comes I shall be able to piece that side of life on to the other, on to the true religion of joy. At present I can’t.”

  “But the old woman. Was she not ugly?”

  Frank’s radiance gradually returned.

  “Ah, no. She was like me. She longed for joy, and knew it when she saw it, the old darling.”

  Another question suggested itself.

  “Then what about Christianity?” asked Darcy.

  “I can’t accept it. I can’t believe in any creed of which the central doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer. Perhaps it was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I don’t understand how it was possible. So I leave it alone; my affair is joy.”

  They had come to the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up caroling into the crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them. Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, stood there like some beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were indistinct with a vitality that somehow was different from that of other men. And some faint glow from it reached Darcy, some thrill, some vibration from that charged recumbent body passed to him, and for a moment he understood as he had not understood before, despite his persistent questions and the candid answers they received, how real, and how realized by Frank, his idea was.

  Then suddenly the muscles in Frank’s neck became stiff and alert, and he half-raised his head, whispering, “The Pan-pipes, the Pan-pipes. Close, oh, so close.”

  Very slowly, as if a sudden movement might interrupt that melody, he raised himself and leaned on the elbow of his bent arm. His eyes opened wider, the lower lids drooped as if he focused his eyes on something very far away, and the smile on his face broadened and quivered like sunlight on still water, till the exultance of its happiness was scarcely human. So he remained motionless and rapt for some minutes, then the look of listening died from his face, and he bowed his head satisfied.

  “Ah, that was good,” he said. “How is it possible you did not hear? Oh, you poor fellow! Did you really hear nothing?”

  A week of this outdoor and stimulating life did wonders in restoring to Darcy the vigor and health which his weeks of fever had filched from him, and as his normal activity and higher pressure of vitality returned, he seemed to himself to fall even more under the spell which the miracle of Frank’s youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes’ silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank’s idea: “But it isn’t possible; it can’t be possible,” and from the fact of his having to assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling and arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind. For in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of manhood, was thirty-five. Yet such was the fact.

  July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain, and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the behavior of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns of June, lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or making huge rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from tree to tree after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked, but with the same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

  “Catch cold?” he would ask, “I’ve forgotten how to do it, I think. I suppose it makes one’s body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors. People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and skinless.”

  “Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?” asked Darcy. “And where, may I ask?”

  Frank thought a moment.

  “I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn,” he said. “For I remember the light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went—where did I go?—oh, yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week ago. You were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it is wet.”

  And he went whistling upstairs.

  Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which he was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in a hammock, then the tramp—or probably scamper—underneath the windy and weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The picture of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by the bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the white blaze of moonshine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour, perhaps a space of silent wide-eyed thought, and then a wandering through the hushed woods to some other dormitory, alone with his happiness, alone with the joy and the life that suffused and enveloped him, without other thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion with the joy of nature.

  They were in the middle of dinner that night, talking on indifferent subjects, when Darcy suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. “At last I’ve got it.”

  “Congratulate you,” said Frank. “But what?”

  “The radical unsoundness of your idea. It is this: All nature from highest to lowest is full, crammed full of suffering; every living organism in nature preys on another, yet in your aim to get close to, to be one with nature, you leave suffering altogether out; you run away from it, you refuse to recognize it. And you are waiting, you say, for the final revelation.”

  Frank’s brow clouded slightly.

  “Well?” he asked, rather wearily.

  “Cannot you guess then when the final revelation will be? In joy you are supreme, I grant you that; I did not know a man could be so master of it. You have learned perhaps practically all that nature can teach. And if, as you think, the final revelation is coming to you, it will be the revelation of horror, suffering, death, pain in all its hideous forms. Suffering does exist; you hate it and fear it.”

  Frank held up his hand.

  “Stop; let me think,” he said.

  There was silence for a long minute.

  “That never struck me,” he said at length. “It is possible that what you suggest is true. Does the sight of Pan mean that, do you think? Is it that nature, take it altogether, suffers horribly, suffers to a hideous inconceivable extent? Shall I be shown all the suffering?”

  He got up and came round to where Darcy sat.

  “If it is so, so be it,” he said. “Because, my dear fellow, I am near, so splendidly near to the final revelation. Today the pipes have sounded almost without pause. I have even heard the rustle in the bushes, I believe, of Pan’s coming. I have seen, yes, I saw today, the bushes pushed aside as if by a hand, and a piece of a face, not human, peered through. But I was not frightened, at least I did not run away this time.”

  He took a turn up to the window and back again.

  “Yes, there is suffering all through,” he said, “and I have left it all out of my search. Perhaps, as you say, the revelation will be that. And in that case, it will be good-bye. I have gone on one line. I shall have gone too far along one road, without having explored the other. But I can’t go back now. I wouldn’t if I could; not a step would I retrace! In any case, whatever the revelation is, it will be God.
I’m sure of that.”

  The rainy weather soon passed, and with the return of the sun Darcy again joined Frank in long rambling days. It grew extraordinarily hotter, and with the fresh bursting of life, after the rain, Frank’s vitality seemed to blaze higher and higher. Then, as is the habit of the English weather, one evening clouds began to bank themselves up in the west, the sun went down in a glare of coppery thunder-rack, and the whole earth broiling under an unspeakable oppression and sultriness paused and panted for the storm. After sunset the remote fires of lightning began to wink and flicker on the horizon, but when bed-time came the storm seemed to have moved no nearer, though a very low unceasing noise of thunder was audible. Weary and oppressed by the stress of the day, Darcy fell at once into a heavy uncomforting sleep.

  He woke suddenly into full consciousness, with the din of some appalling explosion of thunder in his ears, and sat up in bed with racing heart. Then for a moment, as he recovered himself from the panic-land which lies between sleeping and waking, there was silence, except for the steady hissing of rain on the shrubs outside his window. But suddenly that silence was shattered and shredded into fragments by a scream from somewhere close at hand outside in the black garden, a scream of supreme and despairing terror. Again and once again it shrilled up, and then a babble of awful words was interjected. A quivering sobbing voice that he knew, said:

  “My God, oh, my God; oh, Christ!”

  And then followed a little mocking, bleating laugh. Then was silence again; only the rain hissed on the shrubs.

  All this was but the affair of a moment, and without pause either to put on clothes or light a candle, Darcy was already fumbling at his door-handle. Even as he opened it he met a terror-stricken face outside, that of the man-servant who carried a light.

  “Did you hear?” he asked.

  The man’s face was bleached to a dull shining whiteness.