“And you,” I exclaimed—“who are you, and who are these forms that we have seen, these strange inhabitants of this city?”
She gently smiled as she answered, “We are the ghosts of the future. We are the people who are to live in this city generations hence. But all of us do not know that, principally because we do not think about it and study about it enough to know it. And it is generally believed that the men and women who sometimes come here are ghosts who haunt the place.”
“And that is why you are terrified and flee from us?” I exclaimed. “You think we are ghosts from another world?”
“Yes,” she replied; “that is what is thought, and what I used to think.”
“And you,” I asked, “are spirits of human beings yet to be?”
“Yes,” she answered; “but not for a long time. Generations of men—I know not how many—must pass away before we are men and women.”
“Heavens!” exclaimed Bentley, clasping his hands and raising his eyes to the sky, “I shall be a spirit before you are a woman.”
“Perhaps,” she said again, with a sweet smile upon her face, “you may live to be very, very old.”
But Bentley shook his head. This did not console him. For some minutes I stood in contemplation, gazing upon the stone pavement beneath my feet. “And this,” I ejaculated, “is a city inhabited by the ghosts of the future, who believe men and women to be phantoms and spectres?”
She bowed her head.
“But how is it,” I asked, “that you discovered that you are spirits and we mortal men?”
“There are so few of us who think of such things,” she answered, “so few who study, ponder, and reflect. I am fond of study, and I love philosophy; and from the reading of many books I have learned much. From the book which I have here I have learned most; and from its teachings I have gradually come to the belief, which you tell me is the true one, that we are spirits and you men.”
“And what book is that?” I asked.
“It is ‘The Philosophy of Relative Existences,’ by Rupert Vance.”
“Ye gods!” I exclaimed, springing upon the balcony, “that is my book, and I am Rupert Vance.” I stepped toward the volume to seize it, but she raised her hand.
“You cannot touch it,” she said. “It is the ghost of a book. And did you write it?”
“Write it? No,” I said; “I am writing it. It is not yet finished.”
“But here it is,” she said, turning over the last pages. “As a spirit book it is finished. It is very successful; it is held in high estimation by intelligent thinkers; it is a standard work.”
I stood trembling with emotion. “High estimation!” I said. “A standard work!”
“Oh yes,” she replied, with animation; “and it well deserves its great success, especially in its conclusion. I have read it twice.”
“But let me see these concluding pages,” I exclaimed. “Let me look upon what I am to write.”
She smiled, and shook her head, and closed the book. “I would like to do that,” she said, “but if you are really a man you must not know what you are going to do.”
“Oh, tell me, tell me,” cried Bentley from below, “do you know a book called ‘Stellar Studies,’ by Arthur Bentley? It is a book of poems.”
The figure gazed at him. “No,” it said, presently, “I never heard of it.”
I stood trembling. Had the youthful figure before me been flesh and blood, had the book been a real one, I would have torn it from her.
“O wise and lovely being!” I exclaimed, falling on my knees before her, “be also benign and generous. Let me but see the last page of my book. If I have been of benefit to your world; more than all, if I have been of benefit to you, let me see, I implore you—let me see how it is that I have done it.”
She rose with the book in her hand. “You have only to wait until you have done it,” she said, “and then you will know all that you could see here.” I started to my feet and stood alone upon the balcony.
“I am sorry,” said Bentley, as we walked toward the pier where we had left our boat, “that we talked only to that ghost girl, and that the other spirits were all afraid of us. Persons whose souls are choked up with philosophy are not apt to care much for poetry; and even if my book is to be widely known, it is easy to see that she may not have heard of it.”
I walked triumphant. The moon, almost touching the horizon, beamed like red gold. “My dear friend,” said I, “I have always told you that you should put more philosophy into your poetry. That would make it live.”
“And I have always told you,” said he, “that you should not put so much poetry into your philosophy. It misleads people.”
“It didn’t mislead that ghost girl,” said I.
“How do you know?” said Bentley. “Perhaps she is wrong, and the other inhabitants of the city are right, and we may be the ghosts after all. Such things, you know, are only relative. Anyway,” he continued, after a little pause, “I wish I knew that those ghosts were now reading the poem which I am going to begin to-morrow.”
The Real Right Thing
by HENRY JAMES
Henry James (1843–1916) is primarily regarded as a modern novelist, many of his books exploring the marital relationship. His novels also drew heavily on his own experiences as an American transplanted to Europe. James was also a prolific writer of short stories, many of which explored psychological themes. His most famous—and many forget that it is a ghost story—is probably “The Turn of the Screw” (1898) but his fascination with the psychological aspects of the supernatural goes back to one of his earliest works, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868). The following powerful tale first appeared in Black and White: A Weekly Illustrated Record and Review (Apr. 16, 1892).
I
When, after the death of Ashton Doyne—but three months after—George Withermore was approached, as the phrase is, on the subject of a “volume,” the communication came straight from his publishers, who had been, and indeed much more, Doyne’s own; but he was not surprised to learn, on the occurrence of the interview they next suggested, that a certain pressure as to the early issue of a Life had been brought to bear upon them by their late client’s widow. Doyne’s relations with his wife had been, to Withermore’s knowledge, a very special chapter—which would present itself, by the way, as a delicate one for the biographer; but a sense of what she had lost, and even of what she had lacked, had betrayed itself, on the poor woman’s part, from the first days of her bereavement, sufficiently to prepare an observer at all initiated for some attitude of reparation, some espousal even exaggerated of the interests of a distinguished name. George Withermore was, as he felt, initiated; yet what he had not expected was to hear that she had mentioned him as the person in whose hands she would most promptly place the materials for a book.
These materials—diaries, letters, memoranda, notes, documents of many sorts—were her property, and wholly in her control, no conditions at all attaching to any portion of her heritage; so that she was free at present to do as she liked—free, in particular, to do nothing. What Doyne would have arranged had he had time to arrange could be but supposition and guess. Death had taken him too soon and too suddenly, and there was all the pity that the only wishes he was known to have expressed were wishes that put it positively out of account. He had broken short off—that was the way of it; and the end was ragged and needed trimming. Withermore was conscious, abundantly, how close he had stood to him, but he was not less aware of his comparative obscurity. He was young, a journalist, a critic, a hand-to-mouth character, with little, as yet, as was vulgarly said, to show. His writings were few and small, his relations scant and vague. Doyne, on the other hand, had lived long enough—above all had had talent enough—to become great, and among his many friends gilded also with greatness were several to whom his wife would have struck those who knew her as much more likely to appeal.
The preference she had, at all events, uttered—and uttered in a roun
dabout, considerate way that left him a measure of freedom—made our young man feel that he must at least see her and that there would be in any case a good deal to talk about. He immediately wrote to her, she as promptly named an hour, and they had it out. But he came away with his particular idea immensely strengthened. She was a strange woman, and he had never thought her an agreeable one; only there was something that touched him now in her bustling, blundering impatience. She wanted the book to make up, and the individual whom, of her husband’s set, she probably believed she might most manipulate was in every way to help it to make up. She had not taken Doyne seriously enough in life, but the biography should be a solid reply to every imputation on herself. She had scantly known how such books were constructed, but she had been looking and had learned something. It alarmed Withermore a little from the first to see that she would wish to go in for quantity. She talked of “volumes”—but he had his notion of that.
“My thought went straight to you, as his own would have done,” she had said almost as soon as she rose before him there in her large array of mourning—with her big black eyes, her big black wig, her big black fan and gloves, her general gaunt, ugly, tragic, but striking and, as might have been thought from a certain point of view, “elegant” presence. “You’re the one he liked most; oh, much!”—and it had been quite enough to turn Withermore’s head. It little mattered that he could afterward wonder if she had known Doyne enough, when it came to that, to be sure. He would have said for himself indeed that her testimony on such a point would scarcely have counted. Still, there was no smoke without fire; she knew at least what she meant, and he was not a person she could have an interest in flattering. They went up together, without delay, to the great man’s vacant study, which was at the back of the house and looked over the large green garden—a beautiful and inspiring scene, to poor Withermore’s view—common to the expensive row.
“You can perfectly work here, you know,” said Mrs. Doyne: “you shall have the place quite to yourself—I’ll give it all up to you; so that in the evenings, in particular, don’t you see? for quiet and privacy, it will be perfection.”
Perfection indeed, the young man felt as he looked about—having explained that, as his actual occupation was an evening paper and his earlier hours, for a long time yet, regularly taken up, he would have to come always at night. The place was full of their lost friend; everything in it had belonged to him; everything they touched had been part of his life. It was for the moment too much for Withermore—too great an honour and even too great a care; memories still recent came back to him, and, while his heart beat faster and his eyes filled with tears, the pressure of his loyalty seemed almost more than he could carry. At the sight of his tears Mrs. Doyne’s own rose to her lids, and the two, for a minute, only looked at each other. He half expected her to break out: ‘Oh, help me to feel as I know you know I want to feel!’ And after a little one of them said, with the other’s deep assent—it didn’t matter which: “It’s here that we’re with him.” But it was definitely the young man who put it, before they left the room, that it was there he was with them.
The young man began to come as soon as he could arrange it, and then it was, on the spot, in the charmed stillness, between the lamp and the fire and with the curtains drawn, that a certain intenser consciousness crept over him. He turned in out of the black London November; he passed through the large, hushed house and up the red-carpeted staircase where he only found in his path the whisk of a soundless, trained maid, or the reach, out of a doorway, of Mrs. Doyne’s queenly weeds1 and approving tragic face; and then, by a mere touch of the well-made door that gave so sharp and pleasant a click, shut himself in for three or four warm hours with the spirit—as he had always distinctly declared it—of his master. He was not a little frightened when, even the first night, it came over him that he had really been most affected, in the whole matter, by the prospect, the privilege and the luxury, of this sensation. He had not, he could now reflect, definitely considered the question of the book—as to which there was here, even already, much to consider: he had simply let his affection and admiration—to say nothing of his gratified pride—meet, to the full, the temptation Mrs. Doyne had offered them.
How did he know, without more thought, he might begin to ask himself, that the book was, on the whole, to be desired? What warrant had he ever received from Ashton Doyne himself for so direct and, as it were, so familiar an approach? Great was the art of biography, but there were lives and lives, there were subjects and subjects. He confusedly recalled, so far as that went, old words dropped by Doyne over contemporary compilations, suggestions of how he himself discriminated as to other heroes and other panoramas. He even remembered how his friend, at moments, would have seemed to show himself as holding that the ‘literary’ career might—save in the case of a Johnson and a Scott, with a Boswell and a Lockhart2 to help—best content itself to be represented. The artist was what he did—he was nothing else. Yet how, on the other hand, was not he, George Withermore, poor devil, to have jumped at the chance of spending his winter in an intimacy so rich? It had been simply dazzling—that was the fact. It hadn’t been the ‘terms,’ from the publishers—though these were, as they said at the office, all right; it had been Doyne himself, his company and contact and presence—it had been just what it was turning out, the possibility of an intercourse closer than that of life. Strange that death, of the two things, should have the fewer mysteries and secrets! The first night our young man was alone in the room it seemed to him that his master and he were really for the first time together.
II
Mrs. Doyne had for the most part let him expressively alone, but she had on two or three occasions looked in to see if his needs had been met, and he had had the opportunity of thanking her on the spot for the judgment and zeal with which she had smoothed his way. She had to some extent herself been looking things over and had been able already to muster several groups of letters; all the keys of drawers and cabinets she had, moreover, from the first placed in his hands, with helpful information as to the apparent whereabouts of different matters. She had put him, in a word, in the fullest possible possession, and whether or no her husband had trusted her, she at least, it was clear, trusted her husband’s friend. There grew upon Withermore, nevertheless, the impression that, in spite of all these offices, she was not yet at peace, and that a certain unappeasable anxiety continued even to keep step with her confidence. Though she was full of consideration, she was at the same time perceptibly there: he felt her, through a supersubtle sixth sense that the whole connection had already brought into play, hover, in the still hours, at the top of landings and on the other side of doors, gathered from the soundless brush of her skirts the hint of her watchings and waitings. One evening when, at his friend’s table, he had lost himself in the depths of correspondence, he was made to start and turn by the suggestion that some one was behind him. Mrs. Doyne had come in without his hearing the door, and she gave a strained smile as he sprang to his feet. “I hope,” she said, “I haven’t frightened you.”
“Just a little—I was so absorbed. It was as if, for the instant,” the young man explained, “it had been himself.”
The oddity of her face increased in her wonder. “Ashton?”
“He does seem so near,” said Withermore.
“To you too?”
This naturally struck him. “He does then to you?”
She hesitated, not moving from the spot where she had first stood, but looking round the room as if to penetrate its duskier angles. She had a way of raising to the level of her nose the big black fan which she apparently never laid aside and with which she thus covered the lower half of her face, her rather hard eyes, above it, becoming the more ambiguous. “Sometimes.”
“Here,” Withermore went on, “it’s as if he might at any moment come in. That’s why I jumped just now. The time is so short since he really used to—it only was yesterday. I sit in his chair, I turn his books, I use his pens
, I stir his fire, exactly as if, learning he would presently be back from a walk, I had come up here contentedly to wait. It’s delightful—but it’s strange.”
Mrs. Doyne, still with her fan up, listened with interest. “Does it worry you?”
“No—I like it.”
She hesitated again. “Do you ever feel as if he were—a—quite—a—personally in the room?”
“Well, as I said just now,” her companion laughed, “on hearing you behind me I seemed to take it so. What do we want, after all,” he asked, “but that he shall be with us?”
“Yes, as you said he would be—that first time.” She stared in full assent. “He is with us.”
She was rather portentous, but Withermore took it smiling. “Then we must keep him. We must do only what he would like.”
“Oh, only that, of course—only. But if he is here—?” And her sombre eyes seemed to throw it out, in vague distress, over her fan.
“It shows that he’s pleased and wants only to help? Yes, surely; it must show that.”
She gave a light gasp and looked again round the room. “Well,” she said as she took leave of him, “remember that I too want only to help.” On which, when she had gone, he felt sufficiently—that she had come in simply to see he was all right.
He was all right more and more, it struck him after this, for as he began to get into his work he moved, as it appeared to him, but the closer to the idea of Doyne’s personal presence. When once this fancy had begun to hang about him he welcomed it, persuaded it, encouraged it, quite cherished it, looking forward all day to feeling it renew itself in the evening, and waiting for the evening very much as one of a pair of lovers might wait for the hour of their appointment. The smallest accidents humoured and confirmed it, and by the end of three or four weeks he had come quite to regard it as the consecration of his enterprise. Wasn’t it what settled the question of what Doyne would have thought of what they were doing? What they were doing was what he wanted done, and they could go on, from step to step, without scruple or doubt. Withermore rejoiced indeed at moments to feel this certitude: there were times of dipping deep into some of Doyne’s secrets when it was particularly pleasant to be able to hold that Doyne desired him, as it were, to know them. He was learning many things that he had not suspected, drawing many curtains, forcing many doors, reading many riddles, going, in general, as they said, behind almost everything. It was at an occasional sharp turn of some of the duskier of these wanderings “behind” that he really, of a sudden, most felt himself, in the intimate, sensible way, face to face with his friend; so that he could scarcely have told, for the instant, if their meeting occurred in the narrow passage and tight squeeze of the past, or at the hour and in the place that actually held him. Was it ’67, or was it but the other side of the table?
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