‘I think we are agreed something must be done,’ he said. ‘Even now, one of the most amiable junior ghosts of my acquaintance, on his way with a motif to a poor tired musician, was radio’d into flinders, and though his own essence is not permanently harmed, his inspiration was shocked quite out of him, and may never be recovered again.’
‘That is so,’ another bore witness. ‘I happened to be projecting myself not far from the spot, and saw the whole occurrence – poor fellow! he had no chance whatever to escape. It was one of these “directive” messages, as they call them, and no ghost of his grade could have stood up for a moment against it.’
‘But it is the universal messages, sent out equally in all directions, that are the most serious menace to our state,’ another urged.
‘Quite so. We have a chance of getting out of the way of the directive ones, but the others leave us no escape.’
‘Look – there goes one now,’ said another, suddenly pointing; ‘luckily it’s far enough away.’
There was an indignant clamour.
‘Vandals!’ ‘Huns!’ ‘Hooligans!’ ‘Shame!’
Then a female spirit spoke. It was known that she owed her condition to a motor accident on earth.
‘I remember a name the grosser ones used to have for those who exceeded the speed limit in their motorcars. They were called road-hogs. In the same way the creators of these disturbances ought to be called ether-hogs.’
There was applause at this, which the young wireless operator, still seeking his pitch, mistook for the general radio-commotion about him.
‘Yes,’ the female spirit went on (she had always been a little garrulous under encouragement), ‘I was afflicted with deafness, and in that horrible instrument they call an Insurance Policy I had to pay an extra premium on that account; dear, dear, the number of times my heart jumped into my mouth as their cars whizzed by!’
But at this point two attendant spirits, whose office it was, gently but firmly ‘damped’ her, that is, merged into her and rarefied her astral coherence; they had heard her story many, many times before. The deliberations continued.
Punitive measures were resolved on. With that the question arose, of whom were they to make an example?
‘Take a survey,’ said the spirit with the aura of silver beard; and a messenger was gone, and immediately back again, with the tidings that at that very moment a young operator, in an admirably susceptible condition of nerves, was seeking to compass a further outrage.
‘Good,’said the venerable one,dismissing his minion again.‘We have now to decide who shall haunt him. The Chair invites suggestions.’
Now the selection of a haunter is always a matter for careful thought. Not every ghost can haunt everybody. Indeed, the superior attenuations have often difficulty in manifesting themselves at all, so that in practice a duller spirit becomes their deputy. Thus it is only the less ghostly ghosts we of earth know, those barely yet weaned from the breast of the world, and that is the weakness of haunting from the ghostly point of view. The perfect message must go through the imperfect channel. The great ghosts may plan, but the coarser ones execute.
But as this is not unknown on earth also, we need hardly dwell on it.
Now the Committee had no more redoubtable haunter in certain respects than it had in the spirit of an old Scottish engineer, who had suffered translation in the middle days of steam. True, they had to watch him rather carefully, for he had more than once been suspected of having earthly hankerings and regrets; but that, a demerit in one sense, meant added haunting-efficacy in another, and no less a spirit than Vanderdecken himself had recommended him for a certain class of seafaring commission. He was bidden to appear, and his errand was explained to him.
‘You understand,’ they said a little severely when all had been made clear. ‘Your instructions are definite, remember, and you are not to exceed them.’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ said that blunt ghost. ‘I kenned sail, and I kenned steam, and I ha’ sairved on a cable-ship. Ye canna dae better than leave a’ tae me.’
There was the ring, at any rate, of sincere intention in his tone, and they were satisfied.
‘Very well,’ said the presiding spirit. ‘You know where to find him. Be off.’
‘Ay, ay, sir – dinna fash yersel’ – I’ll gi’e the laddie a twisting!’
But at that moment a terrific blast from the Cape Cod Station scattered the meeting as if it had been blown from the muzzle of a gun.
And you are to understand that the foregoing took no time at all, as earthly time is reckoned.
ii
‘Oh, get out of my way, you fool! I want the ship that called me five minutes ago – the Bainbridge. Has she called you? . . . O Lord, here’s another lunatic – wants to know who’s won the prize fight! Are you the Bainbridge? Then buzz off! . . . You there – have you had a call from the Bainbridge? Yes, five minutes ago; I think she said she was on fire, but I’m not sure, and I can’t get her note again! You try – shove that Merry Christmas fool out – B-a-i-n . . . No, but I think – I say I think – she said so – perhaps she can’t transmit any more . . . ’
Dot, dash – dot, dash – dot, dash –
Again he was running up and down the gamut, seeking the ship that had given him that flickering uncertain message, and then – silence.
A ship on fire – somewhere –
He was almost certain she had said she was on fire –
And perhaps she could no longer transmit –
Anyway, half a dozen ships were trying for her now.
It was at this moment, when the whole stormy night throbbed with calls for the Bainbridge, that the ghost came to make an example of the young wireless operator for the warning of Ethereal Trespassers at large.
Indeed, the ships were making an abominable racket. The Morse tore from the antennae through the void, and if a homeless spectre missed one annihilating wavelength he encountered another. They raged. What was the good of their being the Great Majority if they were to be bullied by a mortal minority with these devastating devices at its command?
Even as that ghostly avenger, in a state of imminent precipitation, hung about the rocking operating-room, he felt himself racked by disintegrating thrills. The young operator’s fingers were on the transmitting key again.
‘Can’t you get the Bainbridge? Oh, try, for God’s sake . . . Are you there? Nothing come through yet? . . . Doric. Can’t you couple? . . . ’
Lurch, heave; crest, trough; a cant to port, an angle of forty-five degrees to starboard; on the vessel drove, with the antennae high overhead describing those dizzy loops and circles and rendering the night with the sputtering Morse.
Dot, dash – dot, dash – dot, dash –
But already that old ghost, who in his day had known sail and steam and had served on a cable-ship, had hesitated even on the brink of manifestation. He knew that he was only a low-grade ghost, charged rather than trusted with an errand, and their own evident mistrust of him was not a thing greatly to strengthen his allegiance to them. He began to remember his bones and blood, and his past earthly passion for his job. He had been a fine engineer, abreast of all the knowledge of his day, and what he now saw puzzled him exceedingly. By virtue of his instantaneousness and ubiquity, he had already taken a complete conspectus of the ship. Much that he had seen was new, more not. The engines were more powerful, yet essentially the same. In the stokeholds, down the interminable escalades, all was much as it had formerly been. Of electric lighting he had seen more than the beginnings, so that the staring incandescents were no wonder to him, and on the liner’s fripperies of painted and gilded saloons and gymnasium and state-rooms and swimming baths he had wasted little attention. And yet even in gathering himself for visibility he had hesitated. He tried to tell himself why he did so. He told himself that, formidabl
e haunter as he was, it is no easy matter to haunt a deeply preoccupied man. He told himself that he would be able to haunt him all the more soundly did he hold off for awhile and find the hauntee’s weak spot. He told himself that his superiors (a little condescending and sniffy always) had after all left a good deal to his discretion. He told himself that, did he return with his errand unaccomplished, they would at all events be no worse off than they had been before.
In a word, he told himself all the things that we mere mortals tell ourselves when we want to persuade ourselves that our inclinations and our consciences are one and the same thing.
And in the meantime he was peering and prying about a little moving band of wires that passed round two wooden pulleys geared to a sort of clock, with certain coils of wire and a couple of horseshoe magnets, the whole attached to the telephone clasped about the young ether-hog’s head. He was tingling to know what the thing was for.
It was, of course, the Detector, the instrument’s vital ear.
Then the young man’s finger began to tap on the transmitter key again.
‘Doric . . . Anything yet? . . . You’re the Imperator? . . . Are you calling the Bainbridge?’
Now the ghost, who could not make head or tail of the Detector, nevertheless knew Morse; and though it had not yet occurred to him to squeeze himself in between the operator’s ears and the telephone receiver, he read the transmitted message. Also he saw the young man’s strained and sweating face. He wanted some ship – the Bainbridge; from the corrugations of his brows, a grid in the glare of the incandescent, and the glassy set of his eyes, he wanted her badly; and so apparently did those other ships whose mysterious apparatus harrowed the fields of ether with long and short –
Moreover, on board a ship again that wistful old ghost felt himself at home – or would do so could he but grasp the operation of that tapping key, of that air-wire that barked and oscillated overhead, and of that slowly-moving endless band that passed over the magnets and was attached to the receivers about the young ether-hog’s ears.
Whatever they thought of him who had sent him, he had been a person of no small account on earth, and a highly skilled mechanic into the bargain.
Suddenly he found himself in temptation’s grip. He didn’t want to haunt this young man. If he did, something might go wrong with that unknown instrument, and then they might not get this ship they were hunting through the night.
And if he could only ascertain why they wanted her so badly, it would be the simplest thing in space for a ghost to find her.
Then, as he nosed about the Detector, it occurred to him to insinuate a portion of his imponderable fabric between the receiver and the young man’s ear.
The next moment he had started resiliently back again, as like pole repels like pole of the swinging needle. He was trembling as no radio-message had ever set him trembling yet.
Fire! A ship on fire! –
That was why these friendly young engineers and operators were blowing a lot of silly ghosts to smithereens! –
The Bainbridge, on fire! –
What did all the ghosts of the Universe matter if a ship was on fire?
That faithless emissary did not hesitate for an instant. The ghostly Council might cast him out, if they liked; he didn’t care; they should be hogged till Domesday if, on all the seas of the world, a single ship was on fire! A ship on fire? He had once seen a ship on fire, and didn’t want, even as a ghost, to see another.
Even while you have been reading this he was off to find the Bainbridge.
Of course he hadn’t really to go anywhere to find her at all. Low-class and ill-conditioned ghost as he was, he still had that property of ubiquity. An instantaneous double change in his own tension and he was there and back again, with the Bainbridge’s bearings, her course, and the knowledge that it was still not too late. The operator was listening in an agony into the twin receivers; a thrill of thankfulness passed through the ghost that he had not forgotten the Morse he had learned on the cable-ship. Swiftly he precipitated himself into a point of action on the transmitter key.
Long, short – long, short – long, short –
The operator heard. He started up as if he had been hogged himself. His eyes were staring, his mouth horridly open. What was the matter with his instrument?
Long, short – long, short – long, short –
It was not in the telephone. The young man’s eyes fell on his own transmitter key. It was clicking up and down. He read out ‘Bainbridge’, and a bearing, and of course his instrument was spelling it out to the others.
Feverishly he grabbed the telephone.
Already the Doric was acknowledging. So was the Imperator.
He had sent no message –
Yet, though it made him a little sick to think of it, he would let it stand. If one ship was fooled, all would be fooled. At any rate he did not think he had dreamed that first call, that first horrifying call of ‘Bainbridge – fire!’
He sprang to the tube and called up the bridge.
They picked them up from the Bainbridge’s boats towards the middle of Christmas morning; but that unrepentant, old seafaring spectre, returning whence he had come, gave little satisfaction to his superiors. Against all their bullying he was proof; he merely repeated doggedly over and over again, ‘The laddie’s nairves o’ steel! Ower and ower again I manifested mysel’ tae him, but it made na mair impression on him than if I’d tried to ha’nt Saturn oot o’ his Rings! It’s my opeenion that being a ghaistie isna what it was. They hae ower mony new-fangled improvements in these days.’
But his spectral heart was secretly sad because he had not been able to make head or tail of the Detector.
2
The Mortal
i
‘Oh, Egbert,’ the White Lady implored, ‘let me beg of you to abandon this mad, wicked idea!’ Sir Egbert the Dauntless was in the act of passing himself through the wainscot of the North Gallery; he turned, half on this side of the panel, half already in the Priest’s Hole in the thickness of the wall.
‘No, Rowena,’ he replied firmly. ‘You saw fit to cast doubts upon my courage before all the Family Ancestors, and now I intend to do it. If anything happens to me my essence will be upon your head.’
The Lady Rowena wailed. In her agitation she clasped her hands awry, so that they interpenetrated.
‘Nay, Egbert, I did but jest! On earth you were known as the Dauntless; our descendants are proud of you; cannot you forget my foolish words?’
‘No,’ replied Sir Egbert, sternly. ‘Though it cost me my Non-existence I will spend the night in a Human Chamber!’
‘Egbert – Egbert – stay – not that one – not the Parson’s! Think – should he exorcise you! –’
‘Too late; I have spoken!’ said Sir Egbert, with an abrupt wave of his hand. He vanished into the Fifth Dimension. No sooner had he done so than the general lamentation broke out.
‘Oh, he’ll Be, he’ll Be, I know he’ll Be!’ the White Lady sobbed.
To be re-confined in Matter, so that there is no speech save with a tongue and no motion save with limbs – to be once more subject to the Three Dimensions of the grosser life – is the final menace to the spectral Condition.
‘Poor chap – I fancied I detected a trace of Visibility about him already,’ grim Sir Hugo muttered.
‘Oh, it’s playing with Flesh!’ another cried, with a shiver.
‘Almost Human folly!’
‘Already his glide isn’t what it was,’ said the melancholy Lady Annice, who on Earth had been a famous attender at funerals.
‘I shall never behold his dear Aura again,’ moaned the White Lady, already half opaque herself. ‘It will be the Existence of me!’
‘If only it had not been a Parson’s Chamber,’ said the Lady Annice, with mournful reli
sh.
‘Here – catch her quick – she’s solidifying!’ half a dozen of them cried at once.
It was with difficulty that they brought the White Lady even to a state of semi-evaporation again.
ii
It was midnight, and the Parson snored. He turned uneasily in his sleep. Perhaps already he was conscious of Sir Egbert’s presence.
Sir Egbert himself dared approach no nearer to the Mortal Bed than the lattice. Fear had given him the pink gossamer look that is the perilous symptom of veins and blood, and he knew that he received faintly the criss-crossed shadow of the lattice. To save his Nonentity he could not have glided up the shaft of moonlight that streamed in at the window.
Suddenly a violent Hertzian Wave passed through Sir Egbert’s ether. He jumped almost clear out of his Dimension. The Parson had opened his eyes. To Be or not to Be? Had he seen him?
He had. His horrible embodied eyes were on the poor harmless Spectre. The two looked at one another, the one quailing in the moonlight, the other sitting in all the horror of Solidity bolt upright in bed.
Then the Mortal began to practise his fearsome devices.
First he gave the hoarse cry that all ghosts dread, and Sir Egbert felt himself suddenly heavier by a pound. But he remembered his name – the Dauntless. He would not yield.
Then the Parson’s teeth began to chatter. He gibbered, and Sir Egbert wondered whether this was the beginning of the Exorcism. If it was, he would never see the happy old Ancestral Gallery again, never hold his dear Rowena in perfect interpermeation again – never pass himself through a Solid again – never know again the jolly old lark of being nowhere and everywhere at once.
‘Mercy, Mercy!’ he tried to cry; and indeed his voice all but stirred the palpable air.
But there was no mercy in that grisly Parson. His only reply was to shoot the hair up on his head, straight on end.
Then he protruded his eyes.
Then he grinned.
And then he began to talk as it were the deaf and dumb alphabet on his fingers.
The Dead of Night Page 76
