Up to that time I had been at the bar, where I was doing pretty well, but now no respectable firm of solicitors would employ a man who had such an unprofessional thing as a phantom about his chambers. I threw up my practice, and had no sooner changed my last sovereign than I was summoned for keeping a ghost without a licence!
Some men, no doubt, would have given up there and then in despair—but I am made of sterner stuff, and, besides, an idea had already occurred to me of turning the table upon my shadowy persecutor.
Barnjum’s ghost had ruined me: why should I not endeavour to turn an honest penny out of Barnjum’s ghost? It was genuine—as I well knew; it was, in some respects, original; it was eminently calculated to delight the young and instruct the old; there was even a moral or two to be got out of it, and though it had long failed to attract in town, I saw no reason why it should not make a great hit in the provinces.
I borrowed the necessary funds and had soon made all preliminary arrangements for running the wraith of Barnjum on a short tour in the provinces, deciding to open at Tenby, in South Wales.
I took every precaution, travelling by night and keeping within doors all day, lest the shade (which was deplorably destitute of the commonest professional pride) should get about and exhibit itself beforehand for nothing; and so successful was I, that when it first burst upon a Welsh audience, from the platform of the Assembly Rooms, Tenby, no ghost could have wished for a more enthusiastic reception, and—for the first and last time—I felt positively proud of it!
But the applause gradually subsided, and was succeeded by an awkward pause. It had not struck me till that moment that it would be necessary to do or say anything in particular during the exhibition, beyond showing the spectators round the phantom, and making the customary assurance that there was no deception and no concealed machinery, which I could do with a clear conscience. But a terrible conviction struck me as I stood there bowing repeatedly, that the audience had come prepared for a comic duologue, with incidental music and dances.
This was quite out of the question, even supposing that Barnjum’s ghost would have helped me to entertain them, which, perhaps, I could scarcely expect. As it was, it did nothing at all, except grimace at the audience and make an idiotic fool of itself and me—an exhibition of which they soon wearied. I am perfectly certain that an ordinary magic lantern would have made a far deeper impression upon them.
Whether the wraith managed in some covert way, when my attention was diverted, to insult the national prejudices of that sensitive and hot-blooded nation, I cannot say. All I know is, that after sitting still for some time they suddenly rose as one man; chairs were hurled at me through the ghost, and the stage was completely wrecked before the audience could be induced to go away.
It was all over. I was hopelessly ruined now! My weak fancy that even a spectre would have some remnants of common decency and good-feeling hanging about it, had put the finishing touch to my misfortunes!
I paid for the smashed platform and windows with the money that had been taken at the doors, and then I travelled back to London, third class, that night, with the feeling that everything was against me.
* * * *
It was Christmas, and I was sitting gloomily in my shabby Bloomsbury lodgings, watching with a miserable, apathetic interest Barnjum’s wraith as, clad in a Roman toga, topboots, and a turban, it flitted about the horsehair furniture.
I was wondering if they would admit me into any workhouse while the spectre continued my attendant; I was utterly and completely wretched, and now, for the first time, I really repented my conduct in having parted with Barnjum so abruptly by the bleak cliff side, that bright June morning.
I had heard no more of him—I knew he must have reached the bottom after his fall, because I heard the splash he made—but no tidings had come of the discovery of his body; the lake kept its dark secret well.
If I could only hope that this insidious shade, now that it had hounded me down to poverty, would consider this as a sufficient expiation of my error and go away and leave me in peace! But I felt, only too keenly, that it was one of those one-idea’d apparitions, which never know when they have had enough of a good thing—it would be sure to stay and see the very last of me!
All at once there came a sharp tap at my door, and another figure strode solemnly in. This, too, wore the semblance of Barnjum, but was cast in a more substantial mould, and possessed the power of speech, as I gathered from its addressing me instantly as a cowardly villain.
I started back, and stood behind an arm-chair, facing those two forms, the shadow and the solid, with a feeling of sick despair. “Listen to me,” I said, “both of you: so long as your—your original proprietor was content with a single wraith, I put up with it; I did not enjoy myself—but I endured it. But a brace of apparitions is really carrying the thing too far; it’s more than any one man’s fair allowance, and I won’t stand it. I defy the pair of you. I will find means to escape you. I will leave the world! Other people can be ghosts as well as you—it’s not a monopoly! If you don’t go directly, I shall blow my brains out!”
There was no firearm of any description in the house, but I was too excited for perfect accuracy.
“Blow your brains out by all means!” said the solid figure; “I don’t know what all this nonsense you’re talking is about. I’m not a ghost that I’m aware of; I’m alive (no thanks to you); and, to come back to the point—scoundrel!”
“Barnjum—and alive!” I cried, almost with relief. “If that is so,” I added, feeling that I had been imposed upon in a very unworthy and ungentlemanly manner, “will you have the goodness to tell me what right you have to this ridiculous apparition here?”
He did not seem to have noticed it particularly till then. “Hullo!” he said, looking at it with some curiosity, “what d’ye call that thing?”
“I call it a beastly nuisance!” I said. “Ever since—since I last saw you, it’s been following me about everywhere in a—in a very annoying manner!”
Will it be believed that the unfeeling brute only chuckled at this? “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, “but all I can say is that it serves you jolly well right, and I hope it will go on annoying you.”
“This is ungenerous,” I said, determined to appeal to any better feelings he might have; “we did not part on—on the best of terms perhaps—”
“Considering that you kicked me over a precipice when I wasn’t looking,” he retorted brutally, “we may take that as admitted.”
“But, at all events,” I argued, “it is ridiculous to cherish an old grudge all this time; you must see the absurdity of it yourself.”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
I determined to make a last effort to move him. “It is Christmas Eve, Barnjum,” I said earnestly, “Christmas Eve. Think of it. At this hour, thousands of throbbing human hearts are speeding the cheap but genial Christmas card to such of their relations as they consider at all likely to respond with a turkey. The costermonger, imaginative for the nonce, is investing damaged evergreens with a purely fictitious value, and the cheery publican is sending the member of his village goose-club back to his cottage home, rich in the possession of a shot-distended bird and a bottle of poisonous port. Hear my appeal. If I was hasty with you, I have been punished. That detestable thing on the hearthrug there has dogged my path to misery and ruin; you cannot be without some responsibility for its conduct. I ask you now, as a man—nay, as an individual—to call it off. You can do it well enough if you only choose; you know you can.”
But Barnjum wouldn’t; he only looked at his own wraith with a grim satisfaction as it capered in an imbecile fashion upon the rug.
“Do,” I implored him; “I would do it for you, Barnjum. I’ve had it about me for six months, and I am so sick of it.”
Still he hesitated. Some waits outside we
re playing one of those pathetic American melodies—I forget now whether it was “Silver Threads among the Gold,” or “In the Sweet By-and-By”—but, at all events, they struck some sympathetic chord in Barnjum’s rough bosom, for his face began to twitch, and presently he burst unexpectedly into tears.
“You don’t deserve it,” he said between his sobs, “but be it so”; then, turning to the ghost, he added: “Here, you, what’s your name? avaunt! D’ye hear, hook it!”
It wavered for an instant, and then, to my joy, it suddenly “gave” all over, and, shrivelling up into a sort of cobweb, was drawn by the draught into the fireplace, and carried up the chimney, and I never saw it again.
* * * *
Barnjum’s escape was very simple; he had fallen upon one of the herring-boats in the lake, and the heap of freshly-caught fish lying on the deck had merely broken his fall instead of his neck. As soon as he had recovered from the effects, he was called away from this country upon urgent business, and found himself unable to return for months.
But to this day the appearance of the wraith is a mystery to me. If Barnjum had been the kind of man to be an “esoteric Buddhist,” it might be accounted for as an “astral shape”; but esoteric Buddhism requires an exemplary character and years of abstract meditation—both of which conditions were far beyond Barnjum’s attainment.
The shape may have been one of those subtle emanations which we are told some people are constantly shedding, like the coats of an onion, and which certain conditions of the atmosphere, and the extreme activity of Barnjum’s mind under sudden excitement, possibly contributed to materialise in this particular instance.
Or, perhaps, it was merely a caprice of one of those vagrant Poltergeists, or supernatural buffoons, which took upon itself, very officiously, the duty of avenging my behaviour to Barnjum.
Upon one point I am clear: the whole of this system of deliberate persecution being undertaken directly on Barnjum’s account, he is morally and legally bound to reimburse me for the heavy expense and damage which have resulted therefrom.
Hitherto I have been unable to impress Barnjum with this principle, and so my wrongs are still without redress.
I may be asked why I do not make them the basis of an action at law; but persons of any refinement will understand my reluctance to resort to legal proceedings against one with whom I have at least lived on a footing of friendship. I would fain persuade, and shrink from appealing to force; and, besides, I have not succeeded as yet in persuading any solicitor—even a shady one—to take up my case.
THE JOLLY CORNER, by Henry James
CHAPTER I
“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York—he was fifty-six today; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,” which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of another, not quite so “good”—the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been depressingly low. He could live in “Europe,” as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.
These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversion—in which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence, almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organism—where it might be said of them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weather—the autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible place—he loafed about his “work” undeterred, secretly agitated; not in the least “minding” that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine, and challeng
e explanations and really “go into” figures.
It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton, though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn’t, however, going to be better-off for it, as he was—and so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better-off than she found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures—if he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale, breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood oft, in the awful modern crush, when she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to “spirit,” the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference with her precious reference, above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his effort. They had communities of knowledge, “their” knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all overlaid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her, just by “Europe” in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of the spirit from which she had never been diverted.
The Third Ghost Story Megapack Page 5
