The Phantom Coach

by Michael Sims

  For a half hour John Dunn, doubting, raging, overwhelmed with spiritual agony as to the state of his own soul rather than fear, strove to enter that southwest chamber. He was simply powerless against this uncanny obstacle. Finally a great horror as of evil itself came over him. He was a nervous man and very young. He fairly fled to his own chamber and locked himself in like a terror-stricken girl.

  The next morning he went to Miss Gill and told her frankly what had happened, and begged her to say nothing about it lest he should have injured the cause by the betrayal of such weakness, for he actually had come to believe that there was something wrong with the room.

  “What it is I know not, Miss Sophia,” said he, “but I firmly believe, against my will, that there is in that room some accursed evil power at work, of which modern faith and modern science know nothing.”

  Miss Sophia Gill listened with grimly lowering face. She had an inborn respect for the clergy, but she was bound to hold that southwest chamber in the dearly beloved old house of her fathers free of blame.

  “I think I will sleep in that room myself to-night,” she said, when the minister had finished.

  He looked at her in doubt and dismay.

  “I have great admiration for your faith and courage, Miss Sophia,” he said, “but are you wise?”

  “I am fully resolved to sleep in that room to-night,” said she conclusively. There were occasions when Miss Sophia Gill could put on a manner of majesty, and she did now.

  It was ten o’clock that night when Sophia Gill entered the southwest chamber. She had told her sister what she intended doing and had been proof against her tearful entreaties. Amanda was charged not to tell the young girl, Flora.

  “There is no use in frightening that child over nothing,” said Sophia.

  Sophia, when she entered the southwest chamber, set the lamp which she carried on the bureau, and began moving about the room, pulling down the curtains, taking off the nice white counterpane of the bed, and preparing generally for the night.

  As she did so, moving with great coolness and deliberation, she became conscious that she was thinking some thoughts that were foreign to her. She began remembering what she could not have remembered, since she was not then born: the trouble over her mother’s marriage, the bitter opposition, the shutting the door upon her, the ostracizing her from heart and home. She became aware of a most singular sensation as of bitter resentment herself, and not against the mother and sister who had so treated her own mother, but against her own mother, and then she became aware of a like bitterness extended to her own self. She felt malignant toward her mother as a young girl whom she remembered, though she could not have remembered, and she felt malignant toward her own self, and her sister Amanda, and Flora. Evil suggestions surged in her brain—suggestions which turned her heart to stone and which still fascinated her. And all the time by a sort of double consciousness she knew that what she thought was strange and not due to her own volition. She knew that she was thinking the thoughts of some other person, and she knew who. She felt herself possessed.

  But there was tremendous strength in the woman’s nature. She had inherited strength for good and righteous self-assertion, from the evil strength of her ancestors. They had turned their own weapons against themselves. She made an effort which seemed almost mortal, but was conscious that the hideous thing was gone from her. She thought her own thoughts. Then she scouted to herself the idea of anything supernatural about the terrific experience. “I am imagining everything,” she told herself. She went on with her preparations; she went to the bureau to take down her hair. She looked in the glass and saw, instead of her softly parted waves of hair, harsh lines of iron-gray under the black borders of an old-fashioned head-dress. She saw instead of her smooth, broad forehead, a high one wrinkled with the intensest concentration of selfish reflections of a long life; she saw instead of her steady blue eyes, black ones with depths of malignant reserve, behind a broad meaning of ill will; she saw instead of her firm, benevolent mouth one with a hard, thin line, a network of melancholic wrinkles. She saw instead of her own face, middle-aged and good to see, the expression of a life of honesty and good will to others and patience under trials, the face of a very old woman scowling forever with unceasing hatred and misery at herself and all others, at life, and death, at that which had been and that which was to come. She saw instead of her own face in the glass, the face of her dead Aunt Harriet, topping her own shoulders in her own well-known dress!

  Sophia Gill left the room. She went into the one which she shared with her sister Amanda. Amanda looked up and saw her standing there. She had set the lamp on a table, and she stood holding a handkerchief over her face. Amanda looked at her with terror.

  “What is it? What is it, Sophia?” she gasped.

  Sophia still stood with the handkerchief pressed to her face.

  “Oh, Sophia, let me call somebody. Is your face hurt? Sophia, what is the matter with your face?” fairly shrieked Amanda.

  Suddenly Sophia took the handkerchief from her face.

  “Look at me, Amanda Gill,” she said in an awful voice.

  Amanda looked, shrinking.

  “What is it? Oh, what is it? You don’t look hurt. What is it, Sophia?”

  “What do you see?”

  “Why, I see you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. What did you think I would see?”

  Sophia Gill looked at her sister. “Never as long as I live will I tell you what I thought you would see, and you must never ask me,” said she.

  “Well, I never will, Sophia,” replied Amanda, half weeping with terror. “You won’t try to sleep in that room again, Sophia?”

  “No,” said Sophia; “and I am going to sell this house.”

  Rudyard Kipling

  1865–1936

  “Kipling toward the end,” wrote Guy Davenport, “managed to write stories with complex layers of meaning, as rich as Shakespeare’s.” This claim might be extravagant, but Kipling’s reputation has evolved curiously through the three quarters of a century since the Nobel laureate’s death. It reached its nadir during World War II, when George Orwell denounced Kipling as a prophet of relentless expansionism, a man who thought of the British Empire as “a sort of forcible evangelizing,” when in fact, Orwell maintained, it was and had always been “primarily a money-making concern.” Eton alumnus Orwell dismissed Kipling as “vulgar,” mocked his attention to vernacular speech as a condescending failed comedy, and contrarily declared soldier poems such as the 1892 collection Barrack-Room Ballads “his best and most representative work.” But then Orwell even complained that Kipling exaggerated the horrors of the wars he had seen, which surely could not compare with the wars of Orwell’s own benighted era.

  Kipling’s reputation rebounded from Orwell’s attack. Nowadays literary critics lavish praise on many of his works, especially the 1901 novel Kim. It demonstrates not only Kipling’s verve and style as a writer, but also his photographic observation of a setting and his broad compassion for a variety of human beings. In a 2006 Guardian interview, Salman Rushdie admitted that he has “many of the difficulties with Kipling that a lot of people from India have, but every true Indian reader knows that no non-Indian writer understood India as well as Kipling . . . If you want to look at the India of Kipling’s time, there is no writer who will give it to you better.”

  In 1836 Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born to English parents in Mumbai (then still called Bombay by Westerners), and after several unhappy years in England he returned in his late teens to the land of his birth. There he began working hard as a journalist and literary balladeer and by the age of twenty had published his first collection of poems, Departmental Ditties. Kipling’s books are wildly varied, from the boarding school antics of M’Turk and the titular antihero against the brutal masters in Stalky & Co. to the playful history-minded fancy of Puck of Pook’s Hill. Nowadays he is best known for The Jungle Book, The Second Jungle Book, and Just-So Stories, his in
spired volumes of talking-animal stories written mostly during the last few years of the nineteenth century, and for his grand stories of the supernatural. “His tales of the fantastic are chilling, or illuminating or remarkable or sad,” remarked Neil Gaiman, “because his people breathe and dream.”

  So do his settings. In an insightful critique of Kipling, the poet and critic Randall Jarrell remarked, “Knowing what the peoples, animals, plants, weathers of the world look like, sound like, smell like, was Kipling’s metier, and so was knowing the words that could make someone else know. You can argue about the judgment he makes of something, but the thing is there.” As Jarrell points out, the man who began as a journeyman journalist, author of Plain Tales from the Hills, continued to mature as a bold and elegant writer for a half century.

  Kipling wrote many fine and original stories about the supernatural, ranging from the ancient gods of “The Mark of the Beast” to the modern gods of “Wireless.” Many are set in India, including his best-known ghost story, “The Phantom Rickshaw.” His poignant ghost story “They,” however, is set in England. A few months after it was published in the August 1904 issue of Scribner’s Magazine, it appeared in Kipling’s collection Traffics and Discoveries, where he placed immediately before it his poem “The Return of the Children,” in which the Virgin Mary opens the doors of heaven to permit children to return to the world they miss. It’s worth mentioning that the verse the blind woman sings in “They” is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from “The Lost Bower,” a poem about childhood filled with the spirits of lost heroes. In 1899, five years before he published “They,” both Kipling and his seven-year-old daughter Josephine developed pneumonia. Surely Kipling felt guilt as well as sadness when he survived but Josephine did not.

  “They”

  One view called me to another; one hill top to its fellow, half across the county, and since I could answer at no more trouble than the snapping forward of a lever, I let the county flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles; and when at last I turned inland through a huddle of rounded hills and woods I had run myself clean out of my known marks. Beyond that precise hamlet which stands godmother to the capital of the United States, I found hidden villages where bees, the only things awake, boomed in eighty-foot lindens that overhung grey Norman churches; miraculous brooks diving under stone bridges built for heavier traffic than would ever vex them again; tithe-barns larger than their churches, and an old smithy that cried out aloud how it had once been a hall of the Knights of the Temple. Gipsies I found on a common where the gorse, bracken, and heath fought it out together up a mile of Roman road; and a little further on I disturbed a red fox rolling dog-fashion in the naked sunlight.

  As the wooded hills closed about me I stood up in the car to take the bearings of that great Down whose ringed head is a landmark for fifty miles across the low countries. I judged that the lie of the country would bring me across some westward running road that went to his feet, but I did not allow for the confusing veils of the woods. A quick turn plunged me first into a green cutting brimful of liquid sunshine, next into a gloomy tunnel where last year’s dead leaves whispered and scuffled about my tyres. The strong hazel stuff meeting overhead had not been cut for a couple of generations at least, nor had any axe helped the moss-cankered oak and beech to spring above them. Here the road changed frankly into a carpeted ride on whose brown velvet spent primrose-clumps showed like jade, and a few sickly, white-stalked blue-bells nodded together. As the slope favoured I shut off the power and slid over the whirled leaves, expecting every moment to meet a keeper; but I only heard a jay, far off, arguing against the silence under the twilight of the trees.

  Still the track descended. I was on the point of reversing and working my way back on the second speed ere I ended in some swamp, when I saw sunshine through the tangle ahead and lifted the brake.

  It was down again at once. As the light beat across my face my fore-wheels took the turf of a great still lawn from which sprang horsemen ten feet high with levelled lances, monstrous peacocks, and sleek round-headed maids of honour—blue, black, and glistening—all of clipped yew. Across the lawn—the marshalled woods besieged it on three sides—stood an ancient house of lichened and weather-worn stone, with mullioned windows and roofs of rose-red tile. It was flanked by semi-circular walls, also rose-red, that closed the lawn on the fourth side, and at their feet a box hedge grew man-high. There were doves on the roof about the slim brick chimneys, and I caught a glimpse of an octagonal dove-house behind the screening wall.

  Here, then, I stayed; a horseman’s green spear laid at my breast; held by the exceeding beauty of that jewel in that setting.

  “If I am not packed off for a trespasser, or if this knight does not ride a wallop at me,” thought I, “Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth at least must come out of that half-open garden door and ask me to tea.”

  A child appeared at an upper window, and I thought the little thing waved a friendly hand. But it was to call a companion, for presently another bright head showed. Then I heard a laugh among the yew-peacocks, and turning to make sure (till then I had been watching the house only) I saw the silver of a fountain behind a hedge thrown up against the sun. The doves on the roof cooed to the cooing water; but between the two notes I caught the utterly happy chuckle of a child absorbed in some light mischief.

  The garden door—heavy oak sunk deep in the thickness of the wall—opened further: a woman in a big garden hat set her foot slowly on the time-hollowed stone step and as slowly walked across the turf. I was forming some apology when she lifted up her head and I saw that she was blind.

  “I heard you,” she said. “Isn’t that a motor car?”

  “I’m afraid I’ve made a mistake in my road. I should have turned off up above—I never dreamed—” I began.

  “But I’m very glad. Fancy a motor car coming into the garden! It will be such a treat—” She turned and made as though looking about her. “You—you haven’t seen any one, have you—perhaps?”

  “No one to speak to, but the children seemed interested at a distance.”

  “Which?”

  “I saw a couple up at the window just now, and I think I heard a little chap in the grounds.”

  “Oh, lucky you!” she cried, and her face brightened. “I hear them, of course, but that’s all. You’ve seen them and heard them?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “And if I know anything of children one of them’s having a beautiful time by the fountain yonder. Escaped, I should imagine.”

  “You’re fond of children?”

  I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.

  “Of course, of course,” she said. “Then you understand. Then you won’t think it foolish if I ask you to take your car through the gardens, once or twice—quite slowly. I’m sure they’d like to see it. They see so little, poor things. One tries to make their life pleasant, but—” she threw out her hands towards the woods. “We’re so out of the world here.”

  “That will be splendid,” I said. “But I can’t cut up your grass.”

  She faced to the right. “Wait a minute,” she said. “We’re at the South gate, aren’t we? Behind those peacocks there’s a flagged path. We call it the Peacock’s Walk. You can’t see it from here, they tell me, but if you squeeze along by the edge of the wood you can turn at the first peacock and get on to the flags.”

  It was sacrilege to wake that dreaming house-front with the clatter of machinery, but I swung the car to clear the turf, brushed along the edge of the wood and turned in on the broad stone path where the fountain-basin lay like one star-sapphire.

  “May I come too?” she cried. “No, please don’t help me. They’ll like it better if they see me.”

  She felt her way lightly to the front of the car, and with one foo
t on the step she called: “Children, oh, children! Look and see what’s going to happen!”

  The voice would have drawn lost souls from the Pit, for the yearning that underlay its sweetness, and I was not surprised to hear an answering shout behind the yews. It must have been the child by the fountain, but he fled at our approach, leaving a little toy boat in the water. I saw the glint of his blue blouse among the still horsemen.

  Very disposedly we paraded the length of the walk and at her request backed again. This time the child had got the better of his panic, but stood far off and doubting.

  “The little fellow’s watching us,” I said. “I wonder if he’d like a ride.”

  “They’re very shy still. Very shy. But, oh, lucky you to be able to see them! Let’s listen.”

  I stopped the machine at once, and the humid stillness, heavy with the scent of box, cloaked us deep. Shears I could hear where some gardener was clipping; a mumble of bees and broken voices that might have been the doves.

  “Oh, unkind!” she said weariedly.

  “Perhaps they’re only shy of the motor. The little maid at the window looks tremendously interested.”

  “Yes?” She raised her head. “It was wrong of me to say that. They are really fond of me. It’s the only thing that makes life worth living—when they’re fond of you, isn’t it? I daren’t think what the place would be without them. By the way, is it beautiful?”

  “I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.”