The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  They coasted gently down the long hill toward Beacon Street, but the road was badly surfaced, and despite Harry’s care Mr. Arcularis felt his pain again. He found that he could alleviate it a little by leaning to the right, against the arm-rest, and not breathing too deeply. But how glorious to be out again! How strange and vivid the world looked! The trees had innumerable green fresh leaves—they were all blowing and shifting and turning and flashing in the wind; drops of rainwater fell downward sparkling; the robins were singing their absurd, delicious little four-noted songs; even the street cars looked unusually bright and beautiful, just as they used to look when he was a child and had wanted above all things to be a motorman. He found himself smiling foolishly at everything, foolishly and weakly, and wanted to say something about it to Harry. It was no use, though—he had no strength, and the mere finding of words would be almost more than he could manage. And even if he should succeed in saying it, he would then most likely burst into tears. He shook his head slowly from side to side.

  “Ain’t it grand?” he said.

  “I’ll bet it looks good,” said Harry.

  “Words fail me.”

  “You wait till you get out to sea. You’ll have a swell time.”

  “Oh, swell!… I hope not. I hope it’ll be calm.”

  “Tut tut.”

  When they passed the Harvard Club Mr. Arcularis made a slow and somewhat painful effort to turn in his seat and look at it. It might be the last chance to see it for a long time. Why this sentimental longing to stare at it, though? There it was, with the great flag blowing in the wind, the Harvard seal now concealed by the swift folds and now revealed, and there were the windows in the library, where he had spent so many delightful hours reading—Plato, and Kipling, and the Lord knows what—and the balconies from which for so many years he had watched the Marathon. Old Talbot might be in there now, sleeping with a book on his knee, hoping forlornly to be interrupted by any one, for anything.

  “Good-by to the old club,” he said.

  “The bar will miss you,” said Harry, smiling with friendly irony and looking straight ahead.

  “But let there be no moaning,” said Mr. Arcularis.

  “What’s that a quotation from?”

  “ ‘The Odyssey.’ ”

  In spite of the cold, he was glad of the wind on his face, for it helped to dissipate the feeling of vagueness and dizziness that came over him in a sickening wave from time to time. All of a sudden everything would begin to swim and dissolve, the houses would lean their heads together, he had to close his eyes, and there would be a curious and dreadful humming noise, which at regular intervals rose to a crescendo and then drawlingly subsided again. It was disconcerting. Perhaps he still had a trace of fever. When he got on the ship he would have a glass of whisky.… From one of these spells he opened his eyes and found that they were on the ferry, crossing to East Boston. It must have been the ferry’s engines that he had heard. From another spell he woke to find himself on the wharf, the car at a standstill beside a pile of yellow packing-cases.

  “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,” said Harry.

  “Because we’re here,” added Mr. Arcularis.

  He dozed in the car while Harry—and what a good friend Harry was!—attended to all the details. He went and came with tickets and passports and baggage checks and porters. And at last he unwrapped Mr. Arcularis from the rugs and led him up the steep gangplank to the deck, and thence by devious windings to a small cold state-room with a solitary porthole like the eye of a cyclops.

  “Here you are,” he said, “and now I’ve got to go. Did you hear the whistle?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re half asleep. It’s sounded the all-ashore. Good-by, old fellow, and take care of yourself. Bring me back a spray of edelweiss. And send me a picture post-card from the Absolute.”

  “Will you have it finite or infinite?”

  “Oh, infinite. But with your signature on it. Now you’d better turn in for a while and have a nap. Cheerio!”

  Mr. Arcularis took his hand and pressed it hard, and once more felt like crying. Absurd! Had he become a child again?

  “Good-by,” he said.

  He sat down in the little wicker chair, with his overcoat still on, closed his eyes, and listened to the humming of the air in the ventilator. Hurried footsteps ran up and down the corridor. The chair was not too comfortable, and his pain began to bother him again, so he moved, with his coat still on, to the narrow berth and fell asleep. When he woke up, it was dark, and the porthole had been partly opened. He groped for the switch and turned on the light. Then he rang for the steward.

  “It’s cold in here,” he said. “Would you mind closing the port?”

  . . .

  The girl who sat opposite him at dinner was charming. Who was it she reminded him of? Why, of course, the girl at the hospital, the girl with the freckles. Her hair was beautiful, not quite red, not quite gold, nor had it been bobbed; arranged with a sort of graceful untidiness, it made him think of a Melozzo da Forli angel. Her face was freckled, she had a mouth which was both humorous and voluptuous. And she seemed to be alone.

  He frowned at the bill of fare and ordered the thick soup.

  “No hors d’œuvres?” asked the steward.

  “I think not,” said Mr. Arcularis. “They might kill me.”

  The steward permitted himself to be amused and deposited the menu card on the table against the water-bottle. His eyebrows were lifted. As he moved away, the girl followed him with her eyes and smiled.

  “I’m afraid you shocked him,” she said.

  “Impossible,” said Mr. Arcularis. “These stewards, they’re dead souls. How could they be stewards otherwise? And they think they’ve seen and known everything. They suffer terribly from the déjà vu. Personally, I don’t blame them.”

  “It must be a dreadful sort of life.”

  “It’s because they’re dead that they accept it.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I’m sure of it. I’m enough of a dead soul myself to know the signs!”

  “Well, I don’t know what you mean by that!”

  “But nothing mysterious! I’m just out of hospital, after an operation. I was given up for dead. For six months I had given myself up for dead. If you’ve ever been seriously ill you know the feeling. You have a posthumous feeling—a mild, cynical tolerance for everything and every one. What is there you haven’t seen or done or understood? Nothing.”

  Mr. Arcularis waved his hands and smiled.

  “I wish I could understand you,” said the girl, “but I’ve never been ill in my life.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  “Good God!”

  The torrent of the unexpressed and inexpressible paralyzed him and rendered him speechless. He stared at the girl, wondering who she was and then, realizing that he had perhaps stared too fixedly, averted his gaze, gave a little laugh, rolled a pill of bread between his fingers. After a second or two he allowed himself to look at her again and found her smiling.

  “Never pay any attention to invalids,” he said, “or they’ll drag you to the hospital.”

  She examined him critically, with her head tilted a little to one side, but with friendliness.

  “You don’t look like an invalid,” she said.

  Mr. Arcularis thought her charming. His pain ceased to bother him, the disagreeable humming disappeared, or rather, it was dissociated from himself and became merely, as it should be, the sound of the ship’s engines, and he began to think the voyage was going to be really delightful. The parson on his right passed him the salt.

  “I fear you will need this in your soup,” he said.

  “Thank you. Is it as bad as that?”

  The steward, overhearing, was immediately apologetic and solicitous. He explained that on the first day everything was at sixes and sevens. The girl looked up at him and asked him a question.

  “Do yo
u think we’ll have a good voyage?” she said.

  He was passing the hot rolls to the parson, removing the napkins from them with a deprecatory finger.

  “Well, madam, I don’t like to be a Jeremiah, but——”

  “Oh, come,” said the parson, “I hope we have no Jeremiahs.”

  “What do you mean?” said the girl.

  Mr. Arcularis ate his soup with gusto—it was nice and hot.

  “Well, maybe I shouldn’t say it, but there’s a corpse on board, going to Ireland; and I never yet knew a voyage with a corpse on board that we didn’t have bad weather.”

  “Why, steward, you’re just superstitious! What nonsense!”

  “That’s a very ancient superstition,” said Mr. Arcularis. “I’ve heard it many times. Maybe it’s true. Maybe we’ll be wrecked. And what does it matter, after all?” He was very bland.

  “Then let’s be wrecked,” said the parson coldly.

  Nevertheless, Mr. Arcularis felt a shudder go through him on hearing the steward’s remark. A corpse in the hold—a coffin? Perhaps it was true. Perhaps some disaster would befall them. There might be fogs. There might be icebergs. He thought of all the wrecks of which he had read. There was the Titanic, which he had read about in the warm newspaper room at the Harvard Club—it had seemed dreadfully real, even there. That band, playing “Nearer My God to Thee” on the after-deck while the ship sank! It was one of the darkest of his memories. And the Empress of Ireland—all those poor people trapped in the smoking-room, with only one door between them and life, and that door locked for the night by the deck-steward, and the deck-steward nowhere to be found! He shivered, feeling a draft, and turned to the parson.

  “How do these strange delusions arise?” he said.

  The parson looked at him searchingly, appraisingly—from chin to forehead, from forehead to chin—and Mr. Arcularis, feeling uncomfortable, straightened his tie.

  “From nothing but fear,” said the parson. “Nothing on earth but fear.”

  “How strange!” said the girl.

  Mr. Arcularis again looked at her—she had lowered her face—and again tried to think of whom she reminded him. It wasn’t only the little freckle-faced girl at the hospital—both of them had reminded him of some one else. Some one far back in his life: remote, beautiful, lovely. But he couldn’t think. The meal came to an end, they all rose, the ship’s orchestra played a feeble fox-trot, and Mr. Arcularis, once more alone, went to the bar to have his whisky. The room was stuffy, and the ship’s engines were both audible and palpable. The humming and throbbing oppressed him, the rhythm seemed to be the rhythm of his own pain, and after a short time he found his way, with slow steps, holding on to the walls in his moments of weakness and dizziness, to his forlorn and white little room. The port had been—thank God!—closed for the night: it was cold enough anyway. The white and blue ribbons fluttered from the ventilator, the bottle and glasses clicked and clucked as the ship swayed gently to the long, slow motion of the sea. It was all very peculiar—it was all like something he had experienced somewhere before. What was it? Where was it?… He untied his tie, looking at his face in the glass, and wondered, and from time to time put his hand to his side to hold in the pain. It wasn’t at Portsmouth, in his childhood, nor at Salem, nor in the rose-garden at his Aunt Julia’s, nor in the schoolroom at Cambridge. It was something very queer, very intimate, very precious. The jackstones, the Sunday-school cards which he had loved when he was a child … He fell asleep.

  The sense of time was already hopelessly confused. One hour was like another, the sea looked always the same, morning was indistinguishable from afternoon—and was it Tuesday or Wednesday? Mr. Arcularis was sitting in the smoking-room, in his favorite corner, watching the parson teach Miss Dean to play chess. On the deck outside he could see the people passing and repassing in their restless round of the ship. The red jacket went by, then the black hat with the white feather, then the purple scarf, the brown tweed coat, the Bulgarian mustache, the monocle, the Scotch cap with fluttering ribbons, and in no time at all the red jacket again, dipping past the windows with its own peculiar rhythm, followed once more by the black hat and the purple scarf. How odd to reflect on the fixed little orbits of these things—as definite and profound, perhaps, as the orbits of the stars, and as important to God or the Absolute. There was a kind of tyranny in this fixedness, too—to think of it too much made one uncomfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment, to avoid seeing for the fortieth time the Bulgarian mustache and the pursuing monocle. The parson was explaining the movements of knights. Two forward and one to the side. Eight possible moves, always to the opposite color from that on which the piece stands. Two forward and one to the side: Miss Dean repeated the words several times with reflective emphasis. Here, too, was the terrifying fixed curve of the infinite, the creeping curve of logic which at last must become the final signpost at the edge of nothing. After that—the deluge. The great white light of annihilation. The bright flash of death.… Was it merely the sea which made these abstractions so insistent, so intrusive? The mere notion of orbit had somehow become extraordinarily naked; and to rid himself of the discomfort and also to forget a little the pain which bothered his side whenever he sat down, he walked slowly and carefully into the writing-room, and examined a pile of superannuated magazines and catalogues of travel. The bright colors amused him, the photographs of remote islands and mountains, savages in sampans or sarongs or both—it was all very far off and delightful, like something in a dream or a fever. But he found that he was too tired to read and was incapable of concentration. Dreams! Yes, that reminded him. That rather alarming business—sleep-walking!

  Later in the evening—at what hour he didn’t know—he was telling Miss Dean about it, as he had intended to do. They were sitting in deck-chairs on the sheltered side. The sea was black, and there was a cold wind. He wished they had chosen to sit in the lounge.

  Miss Dean was extremely pretty—no, beautiful. She looked at him, too, in a very strange and lovely way, with something of inquiry, something of sympathy, something of affection. It seemed as if, between the question and the answer, they had sat thus for a very long time, exchanging an unspoken secret, simply looking at each other quietly and kindly. Had an hour or two passed? And was it at all necessary to speak?

  “No,” she said, “I never have.”

  She breathed into the low words a note of interrogation and gave him a slow smile.

  “That’s the funny part of it. I never had either until last night. Never in my life. I hardly ever even dream. And it really rather frightens me.”

  “Tell me about it, Mr. Arcularis.”

  “I dreamed at first that I was walking, alone, in a wide plain covered with snow. It was growing dark, I was very cold, my feet were frozen and numb, and I was lost. I came then to a signpost—at first it seemed to me there was nothing on it. Nothing but ice. Just before it grew finally dark, however, I made out on it the one word ‘Polaris.’ ”

  “The Pole Star.”

  “Yes—and you see, I didn’t myself know that. I looked it up only this morning. I suppose I must have seen it somewhere? And of course it rhymes with my name.”

  “Why, so it does!”

  “Anyway, it gave me—in the dream—an awful feeling of despair, and the dream changed. This time, I dreamed I was standing outside my state-room in the little dark corridor, or cul-de-sac, and trying to find the door-handle to let myself in. I was in my pajamas, and again I was very cold. And at this point I woke up.… The extraordinary thing is that’s exactly where I was!”

  “Good heavens. How strange!”

  “Yes. And now the question is, where had I been? I was frightened, when I came to—not unnaturally. For among other things I did have, quite definitely, the feeling that I had been somewhere. Somewhere where it was very cold. It doesn’t sound very proper. Suppose I had been seen!”

  “That might have been awkward,” said Miss Dean.

  “Awkward! It might
indeed. It’s very singular. I’ve never done such a thing before. It’s this sort of thing that reminds one—rather wholesomely, perhaps, don’t you think?”—and Mr. Arcularis gave a nervous little laugh—“how extraordinarily little we know about the workings of our own minds or souls. After all, what do we know?”

  “Nothing—nothing—nothing—nothing,” said Miss Dean slowly.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  Their voices had dropped, and again they were silent; and again they looked at each other gently and sympathetically, as if for the exchange of something unspoken and perhaps unspeakable. Time ceased. The orbit—so it seemed to Mr. Arcularis—once more became pure, became absolute. And once more he found himself wondering who it was that Miss Dean—Clarice Dean—reminded him of. Long ago and far away. Like those pictures of the islands and mountains. The little freckle-faced girl at the hospital was merely, as it were, the stepping-stone, the signpost, or, as in algebra, the “equals” sign. But what was it they both “equaled”? The jackstones came again into his mind and his Aunt Julia’s rose-garden—at sunset; but this was ridiculous. It couldn’t be simply that they reminded him of his childhood! And yet why not?

  They went into the lounge. The ship’s orchestra, in the oval-shaped balcony among faded palms, was playing the finale of “Cavalleria Rusticana,” playing it badly.

  “Good God!” said Mr. Arcularis, “can’t I ever escape from that damned sentimental tune? It’s the last thing I heard in America, and the last thing I want to hear.”

  “But don’t you like it?”

  “As music? No! It moves me too much, but in the wrong way.”

  “What, exactly, do you mean?”

  “Exactly? Nothing. When I heard it at the hospital—when was it?—it made me feel like crying. Three old Italians tootling it in the rain. I suppose, like most people, I’m afraid of my feelings.”

  “Are they so dangerous?”

  “Now then, young woman! Are you pulling my leg?”