“All in my mind is confused, nor can I dissever
The mould of the visible world from the shape of my thought in me—
The Inward and Outward are fused, and through them murmur forever
The sorrow whose sound is the wind and the roar of the limitless sea.”
“Do you remember,” Arne asked, “when we saw that play? Both younger and more hopeful. How has the world used you? As for me, I have done nothing since I came here but that sketch, finished months ago. I have not lost ambition, but I feel fettered.”
“Absinthe?—opium?—tobacco?” I hinted.
“Neither,” he answered. “I try to work, but visions, widely different from what I will, crowd on me, as on the Jew in the play. Not the unconscious brain action all thinkers know, but a dictation from without. No rush of creative impulses, but a dragging sense of something else I ought to paint.”
“Briefly,” I said, “you are a ‘Haunted Man.’”
“Haunted by a willful design,” said he. “I feel as if something had happened somewhere which I must show.”
“What is it like?” I asked.
“I wish I could tell you,” he replied. “But only odd bits change places, like looking in a kaleidoscope; yet all cluster around one centre.”
One day, looking over his portfolios, I found an old Temple Bar, which he said he kept for this passage—which he read to me—from T. A. Trollope’s “Artist’s Tragedy:”
“The old walls and ceilings and floors must be saturated with the exhalations of human emotions! These lintels, doorways, and stairs have become, by long use and homeliness, dear to human hearts, and have become so intimately blended a portion of the mental furniture of human lives, that they have contributed their part to the formation of human characters. Such facts and considerations have gone to the fashioning of the mental habitudes of all of us. If all could have been recorded! If emotion had the property of photographing itself on the surfaces of the walls which had witnessed it! Even if only passion, when translated into acts, could have done so! Ah, what palimpsests! What deciphering of tangled records! What skillful separation of successive layers of ‘passionography!’”
“I know a room,” said Arne, “thronged with acts that elbow me from my work and fill me with unrest.”
I looked at him in mute surprise.
“I suppose,” he went on, “such things do not interest you.”
“No—yes,” I stammered. “I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”
“Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”
“That,” I said, “is like Draper’s theory of shadows on walls always staying. He shows how after a breath passes over a coin or key, its spectral outline remains for months after the substance is removed. But can the mist of circumstance sweeping over us make our vacant places hold any trace of us?”
“Why not? Who can deny it? Why do you look at me so?” he asked.
I could not tell him the sad tale. I hesitated; then said: “I was thinking of Volz, a friend I had, who not only believed in what Bulwer calls ‘a power akin to mesmerism and superior to it, once called Magic, and that it might reach over the dead, so far as their experience on earth,’ but also in animal magnetism from any distance.”
Arne grew queerly excited. “If Time and Space exist but in our thoughts, why should it not be true?” said he. “Macdonald’s lover cries, ‘That which has been is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her—what matters it when, or where, or how?’” He sighed. “In Acapulco, a year ago, I saw a woman who has been before me ever since—the centre of the circling, changing, crude fancies that trouble me.”
“Did you know her?” I asked.
‘No, nor anything about her, not even her name. It is like a spell. I must paint her before anything else, but I cannot yet decide how. I feel sure she has played a tragic part in some life-drama.”
“Swinburne’s queen of panthers,” I hinted.
“Yes. But I was not in love. Love I must forego. I am not a man with an income.”
“I know you are not a nincompoop!” I said, always trying to change such themes by a jest. I could not tell him I knew a place which had the influence he talked of. I could not re-visit that house.
Soon after he told me he had begun his picture, but would not show it. He complained that one figure kept its back toward him. He worked on it till he fell ill. Even then he hid it. “Only a layer of passionography,” he said.
I grew restless. I thought his mood affected mine. It was a torment as well as a puzzle to me that his whole talk should be of the influence of houses, rooms, even personal property that had known other owners. Once I asked him if he had anything like the brown coat Sheridan swore drew ill-luck to him.
“Sometimes I think,” he answered, “it is this special brown paint artists prize which affects me. It is made from the best asphaltum, and that can be got only from Egyptian mummy-cloths. Very likely dust of the mummies is ground in it. I ought to feel their ill-will.”
One day I went to Saucelito. In the still woods I forgot my unrest till coming to the stream where, as I suddenly remembered, Anson was found dead, a dread took me which I tried to lose by putting into rhyme. Turning my pockets at night, I crumpled the page I had written on, and threw it on the floor.
In uneasy sleep I dreamed I was again in Paris, not where I liked to recall being, but at “Bullier’s,” and in war-time. The bald, spectacled leader of the orchestra, leaning back, shamming sleep, while a dancing, stamping, screaming crowd wave tri-colored flags, and call for the “Chant du Depart.” Three thousand voices in a rushing roar that makes the twenty thousand lights waver, in spasmodic but steady chorus:
“Les departs—parts—parts!
Les departs—parts—parts!
Les departs—parts—parts!”
Roused, I supposed by passing rioters, I did not try to sleep again, but rose to write a letter for the early mail. As I struck a light I saw, smoothed out on the table, the wrinkled page I had cast aside. The ink was yet wet on two lines added to each verse. A chill crept over me as I read:
FOREST MURMURS.
Across the woodland bridge I pass,
And sway its three long, narrow planks,
To mark how gliding waters glass
Bright blossoms doubled ranks on ranks;
And how through tangle of the ferns
Floats incense from veiled flower-urns,
What would the babbling brook reveal?
What may these trembling depths conceal?
Dread secret of the dense woods, held
With restless shudders horror-spelled!
How shift the shadows of the wood,
As if it tossed in troubled sleep!
Strange whispers, vaguely understood,
Above, below, around me creep;
While in the sombre-shadowed stream
Great scarlet splashes far down gleam,
The odd-reflected, stately shapes
Of cardinals in crimson capes;
Not those—but spectral pools of blood
That stain these sands through strongest flood!
Like blare of trumpets through black nights—
Or sunset clouds before a storm—
Are these red phantom water-sprites
That mock me with fantastic form;
With flitting of the last year’s bird
Fled ripples that its low flight stirred—
How should these rushing waters learn
Aught but the bend of this year’s fern?
The lonesome wood, with bated breath,
Hints of a hidden blow—and death!
I could not stay alone. I ran to Arne’s room. As I knocked, the falling of some light thing within made me think he was stirring. I went in. He sat in the moonlight, back to me before his easel. The picture on it might be the one he kept secret. I would not look. I went to his side and touched him. He had been dead for hours! I turned the unseen canvas to the wall.
Next day I packed and planned to go East. I paid the landlady not to send Arne’s body to the morgue, and watched it that night, when a sudden memory swept over me like a tidal wave. There was a likeness in the room to one where I had before watched the dead. Yes—there were the windows, there the doors—just here stood the bed, in the same spot I sat. What wildness was in the air of San Francisco!
To put such crazy thoughts to flight I would look at Arne’s last work. Yet I wavered, and more than once turned away after laying my hand on it. At last I snatched it, placed it on the easel and lighted the nearest gas-burner before looking at it. Then—great heavens! How had this vision come to Arne? It was the scene where Felipa cursed us. Every detail of the room reproduced, even the gay birds on the wall-paper, and her flower-pots. The figures and faces of Dering and Volz were true as hers, and in the figure with averted face which Arne had said kept its back to him, I knew—myself! What strange insight had he gained by looking at Felipa? It was like the man who trembled before the unknown portrait of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
How long I gazed at the picture I do not know. I heard, without heeding, the doorbell ring and steps along the hall. Voices. Some one looking at rooms. The landlady, saying this room was to let, but unwilling to show it, forced to own its last tenant lay there dead. This seemed no shock to the stranger.
“Well,” said her shrill tones, “poor as he was he’s better dead than alive!”
The door opened as a well-known voice cried: “My God! Say not that! The nerve which hears is last to die—”
Volz stood before me! Awe-struck, we looked at each other in silence. Then he waved his hand to and fro before his eyes.
“Is this a dream?” he said. “There,” pointing to the bed; “you”—to me; “the same words—the very room! Is it our fate?”
I pointed to the picture and to Arne. “The last work of this man, who thought it a fancy sketch?”
While Volz stood dumb and motionless before it, the landlady spoke:
“Then you know the place. Can you tell what ails it? There have been suicides in this room. No one prospers in the house. My cousin, who is a house-mover, warned me against taking it. He says before the store was put under it here it stood on Bush Street, and before that on Telegraph Hill.”
Volz clutched my arm. “It is ‘The Flying Dutchman’ of a house!” he cried, and drew me fast down stairs and out into a dense fog which made the world seem a tale that was told, blotting out all but our two slanting forms, bent as by what poor Wynne would have called “a blast from hell,” hurrying blindly away. I heard the voice of Volz as if from afar: “The magnetic man is a spirit!”
THE PHANTOM MODEL: A WAPPING ROMANCE, by Hume Nisbet
Originally published in The Haunted Station (1894).
Chapter I
The Studio
“Rhoda is a very nice girl in her way, Algy, my boy, and poses wonderfully, considering the hundreds of times she has had to do it; but she isn’t the model for that Beatrice of yours, and if you want to make a hit of it, you must go further afield, and hook a face not quite so familiar to the British Public.”
It was a large apartment, one of a set of studios in the artistic barrack off the Fulham Road, which the landlord, himself a theatrical Bohemian of the first class, has rushed up for the accommodation of youthful luminaries who are yet in the nebulous stage of their Art-course. Each of these hazy specks hopes to shine out a full-lustred Star in good time; they have all a proper contempt also for those servile daubsters who consent to the indignity of having R.A. added to their own proper, or assumed, names. Most of them belong to the advanced school of Impressionists, and allow, with reservations, that Jimmy Whitetuft has genius, as they know that he is the most generous, as well as the most epigrammatical, of painters, while Rhoda, the model, also knows that he is the kindest and most chivalrous of patrons, who stands more of her caprices than most of her other masters do, allows her more frequent as well as longer rests in the two hours’ sitting, and can always be depended upon for a half-crown on an emergency; good-natured, sardonic Jimmy Whitetuft, who can well appreciate the caprices of any woman, or butterfly of the hour, seeing that he has so many of them himself.
Rhoda Prettyman is occupied at the present moment in what she likes best, warming her young, lithe, Greek-like figure at the stove, while she puffs out vigorous wreaths of smoke from the cigarette she has picked up at the table, in the passing from the dais to the stove. She is perfect in face, hair, figure and colour, not yet sixteen, and greatly in demand by artists and sculptors; a good girl and a merry one, who prefers bitter beer to champagne, a night in the pit to the ceremony of a private box, with a dozen or so of oysters afterwards at a little shop, rather than run her entertainer into the awful expense of a supper at the Criterion or Gam’s. Her father and mother having served as models before her, she has been accustomed to the disporting of her charms a la vue on raised daises from her tenderest years, and to the patois of the studios since she could lisp, so that she is as unconscious as a Solomon Island young lady in the bosom of her own family, and can patter “Art” as fluently as any picture dealer in the land.
They are all smoking hard, while they criticize the unfinished Exhibition picture of their host, Algar Gray, during this rest time of the model; Rhoda has not been posing for that picture now, for at the present time the studio is devoted to a life-club, and Rhoda has been hired for this purpose by those hard-working students, who form the young school. Jimmy Whitetuft is the visitor who drops in to cut them up; a marvellous eye for colour and effect Jimmy has, and they are happy in his friendly censorship.
All round the room the easels are set up, with their canvases, in a half-moon range, and on these canvases Rhoda can see herself as in half-a-dozen mirrors, reflected in the same number of different styles as well as postures, for these students aim at originality. But the picture which now occupies their attention is a bishop, half-length, in the second working upon which the well-known features and figure of Rhoda are depicted in thirteenth-century costume as the Beatrice of Dante, and while the young painter looks at his stale design with discontented eyes, his friends act the part of Job’s comforters.
“There isn’t a professional model in London who can stand for Beatrice, if you want to make her live. They have all been in too many characters already. You must have something fresh.”
“Yes, I know,” muttered Algar Gray. “But where the deuce shall I find her?”
Go to the country. You may see something there,” suggested Jack Brunton, the landscapist. “I always manage to pick up something fresh in the country.”
“The country be blowed for character,” growled Will Murray. “Go to the East End of London, if you want a proper Beatrice; to the half-starved crew, with their big eyes and thin cheeks. That’s the sort of thing to produce the spiritual longing, wistful look you want. I saw one the other day, near the Thames Tunnel, while I was on the prowl, who would have done exactly.”
“What was she?” asked Algar eagerly.
“A Ratcliff Highway stroller, I should say. At any rate, I met her in one of the lowest pubs, pouring down Irish whiskey by the tumbler, with never a wink, and using the homespun in a most delectable fashion. Her mate might have served for Semiramis, and she took four ale from the quart pot, but the other, the Beatrice, swallowed her dose neat, and as if it had been
cold water from one of the springs of Paradise where, in olden times, she was wont to gather flowers.”
“Good Heavens! Will, you are atrocious. The sentiment of Dante would be killed by such a woman.”
“Realistic, dear boy, that’s all. You will find very exquisite flowers sometimes even on a dust-heap, as well as where humanity grows thickest and rankest. We have all to go through the different stages of earthly experience, according to Blavatsky. This Beatrice may have been the original of Dante in the thirteenth century, now going through her Wapping experience. It seems nasty, yet it may be necessary.”
“What like was she?”
“What sort of an ideal had you when you first dreamt of that picture, Algy?”
“A tall, slender woman, of about twenty or twenty-two, graceful and refined, with pale face blue-veined and clear, with dark hair and eyes indifferent as to shade, yet out-looking—a soulful gaze from a classical, passive and passionless face.”
“That is exactly the Beatrice of the East End shanty and the Irish whiskey, the sort of holy after-death calm pervading her, the alabaster-lamp-like complexion lit up by pure spirits undiluted, the general dreamy, indifferent pose—it was all there when I first saw her, only a battle royal afterwards occurred between her and the Amazon over a sailor, during which the alabaster lamp flamed up and Semiramis came off second best; for commend me to your spiritual demons when claws and teeth are wanted. No matter, I have found your model for you; take a turn with me this evening and I’ll perhaps be able to point her out to you, the after negotiations I leave in your own romantic hands.”
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack Page 28
