The Serapion Brethren Volume I Part 9

"I'm sorry for you,' said Marzell; 'for my part, the moment I think of a girl dressed for her wedding, I feel sweet, secret thrills going all through me; and if I see such a creature, I feel impelled to clasp her to me, mentally, with a lofty, pure affection which has nothing in common with mundane pa.s.sion.'

"'Oh!' said Alexander, 'I know you always fall in love with every bride you come across; and often even other people's sweethearts are to be found set up in that inner sanctuary which you have established in your imagination.'

"'He loves with them that love,' said Severin; 'that's why I like him so much.'

"I shall set my aunt at him,' said Alexander, laughing, 'and see if that will rid me of a species of haunting which is becoming rather a nuisance to me. You are looking at me with questioning glances, are you?--very well then; I'll make a clean breast of it. The old-maid nature is traceable in me in this further respect, that I feel a perfectly unendurable terror of ghosts, and go on like some little child whom its nurse has frightened with a bogy. What happens is no less than this: that often in broad daylight, and particularly about mid-day, when I'm looking into the chests and boxes, I suddenly seem to catch a glimpse of my aunt's peaky nose close beside me, and of her long, lean fingers poking in among the clothes and linen, and rummaging among them. If I take down a teacup, or a saucepan off the wall, to look at them with a feeling of satisfaction, all the rest rattle, and I expect to see a ghostly hand offering me another; then I throw the things down, and run to the front-room without looking over my shoulder. There I sing or whistle out of the open window into the street, at which Mistress Anne is greatly scandalized: and that the aunt "walks" every night at twelve o'clock is a positive and undoubted fact.'

"Marzell laughed heartily at this. Severin remained grave, and said, 'Let us hear all about that; it'll probably turn out to be some trick or other. Fancy a fellow with your enlightened, advanced views, turning spirit-seer!'

"'Well, Severin,' said Alexander, 'you know quite well, and so does Marzell, that n.o.body could be less of a believer in ghosts and apparitions than I have always been. Never in my life till now have I ever met with anything in the least out of the common, and I had never had the slightest experience of that strange, nervous sense of the proximity of spiritual principles belonging to another state of being which paralyzes both body and mind; but let me tell you what happened the very first night I spent in the house.'

"'Not too loud, then,' said Marzell, 'for I think our neighbours here are doing us the favour of listening to what we are saying.'

"'They shan't hear,' said Alexander; 'indeed I scarcely like to tell even you; however, here goes, I may as well out with it. Mistress Anne received me, dissolved in tears, and went before me with a branched silver candlestick in her trembling hands to the bedroom, groaning and coughing as she went. The postboy had to bring in my trunk, and as he pocketed, with profuse thanks, the tip I gave him, he took a survey of the room with a grin on his face, till he fixed his eyes on the great towering bed with the sea-green curtains.

"'"My word!" he cried, "the gentleman'll have a better night of it than he would have had in the old coach!--and the nightgown and nightcap all ready and waiting!"

"'Mistress Anne, almost fainting with the shock of this irreverent mention of the maidenly night-gear, was letting the candlestick fall, but I caught it in time, and lighted the fellow out. He cast a facetious look at the old woman as he departed. When I came back she was all in a tremble; she thought I would tell her to go, and proceed coolly to desecrate the maidenly couch by sleeping in it, but she revived when I told her I wasn't accustomed to anything so soft, and should be obliged if she would make me up a shake-down as well as she could in the sitting-room. Her wrinkles of annoyance vanished, and her face lighted up, in a way it never has since, into a most gracious smile. She dipped her long lean arms down to the ground, fingered up the down-trodden heels of her slippers, and trotted off, half frightened and half delighted. As I meant to have a fine long sleep, I told her not to come with my coffee before nine o'clock; so I left the old woman for the night almost with Wallenstein's words.

"I was tired to death, and thought I should fall asleep in a moment, but the manifold thoughts and fancies which began to cross each other in my brain drove sleep away. I seemed to be only beginning to realize the rapid change which had taken place in my position and circ.u.mstances. It was only now, when I had actually taken possession of my property, and was absolutely in my house, that I quite grasped the fact that I was suddenly lifted out of very narrow circ.u.mstances to a position of affluence, and that life was opening before me a vista of most agreeable ease and comfort. The watchman's discordant voice croaked out "Eleven," and "Twelve." I was so wide awake that I distinctly heard my watch ticking on the table, and a cricket chirping somewhere a long way off; but as the last stroke of twelve sounded, hollow and faint, from a church-clock in the distance, measured footfalls began to walk up and down the room, and at every step came the sounds of sobbing and sighing, growing louder and louder, till they were like the heart-breaking cries of some creature in deadly pain or peril, and then there came a scuffling and a scratching on the outside of the door, and a dog whimpered and moaned, in tones that were almost human. I had noticed the old pug--my aunt's pet and darling--the evening before. It was evidently him, whining to get in. I got out of bed: I stared most scrutinizingly all about the room, which was dimly lighted by the glimmer of the sky. Everything that was in it I could make out distinctly; but no form was to be seen moving up and down, though the footsteps, and the sobbing and sighing, still went on, apparently close beside my bed. And then, suddenly, I was seized by that terror, arising from the proximity of a spirit, which I had never known before. I felt a cold perspiration dropping from my forehead, and my hair standing straight up on end, as if frozen by its iciness. I could not move a limb, nor open my mouth to scream, for terror; but my blood streamed faster in my throbbing veins, and kept my inner senses active, though they could exercise no control over my organs, which were paralyzed as with a spasm of death. Suddenly the footsteps stopped, and the sobbing ceased; then I could hear a sort of coughing sound--like a clearing of the throat more than coughing; the door of a cupboard seemed to open; there was a clattering as of a silver spoon; then a sound as if some bottle was opened and put back on the shelf; a sound of swallowing, and then a deep-drawn sigh. At that instant a tall, white figure seemed to come wavering forward out of the wall. I sunk down into the depths of an ice river of the wildest terror. I lost consciousness.

"I came to myself with the sensation of a fall from some height. You all know that every-day dream sensation; but the peculiar feeling that I experienced then I hardly know how to describe to you. It was some time before I could make out where I was, and then there was a sense as if something terrible had been happening, which a long, death-like sleep had wiped away the remembrance of. At last it all came gradually back to me, but I thought it was nothing but a painful dream. However, when I got up I noticed the portrait for the first time--the portrait in the wedding-dress; a life-size, three-quarter length portrait. A cold shiver ran down my back, for I felt sure I recognized in it the figure which I had seen in the night. But then I could see nothing in the shape of a cupboard in the room, and that confirmed me in the conclusion that I had only been dreaming.

"'Mistress Anne brought my coffee. She looked me long in the face, and said, "Eh, sir! you _are_ looking pale and badly!--has anything been happening?" Far from telling her anything about it, I said an oppression in my chest had prevented me from sleeping. "It's the stomach!--it's the stomach!" said the old woman. "Eh! we've help at hand for that!" She scuffled up to the wall; opened a door in the hangings which I had not noticed before, and I saw into a cupboard where there were gla.s.ses, small bottles, and two or three silver spoons. The old woman took out one of the spoons, clattering and tinkling it as she did so; opened a bottle; poured a few drops from it into the spoon; put it back in its place, and then came towards me with her unsteady, wavering gait. I gave a scream of horror. It was the exact reproduction, in broad, waking daylight, of the scene of the previous night.

"'"Well, well!" croaked the old woman, with a strange grin; "it's only a drop of medicine, sir. The mistress was troubled with her stomach too, and often had to take a little."

"'I manned myself, and swallowed the stuff, which was bitter and hot. My eyes were on the bride's picture, which was just over the wall-press. "Whose portrait's that?" I asked.

"'"Good gracious, sir! don't you know?" she cried. "That's poor dear mistress, that's dead and gone your aunt." The tears ran down her cheeks. The dog began to whimper, as it had done in the night. I mastered my inward shudder, and forced myself with some difficulty to be composed. I said:

"'"Mistress Anne! I feel quite positive that my aunt was at that cupboard last night at twelve o'clock, taking some of those drops."

"'The old woman showed no surprise. A strange, deadly pallor seemed to extinguish the last sparks of life in her wrinkled face, and she said softly, "Has the Feast of the Invention of the Cross come round again?--No; it's long past the third of May."

"'I didn't feel able to ask anything further, and the old woman went away. I dressed as fast as I could, left my breakfast untouched, and ran as quickly as possible into the open air to try and shake off the dreadful feeling of unreality--as if everything was a horrible dream--which had taken possession of me again. That night, without my having given any orders on the subject, Mistress Anne made up my bed in a nice cheerful room facing the street. I have never said another word to her about what I heard and saw, far less to Falter. Do me the favour, you two, to say nothing about it either, or there will only be a lot of annoying t.i.ttle-tattle, and endless troublesome questions, and, very likely, all the bother of a formal investigation by the Psychological Society. Even in the room where I sleep now, I feel pretty certain I can hear the footsteps and the sobs every night at midnight. However, I mean to put up with it the best way I can for a short time, and then try to get rid of the house as quietly as possible, and look out for another.'

"When Alexander had finished, there was a short silence. Then Marzell said:

"'All this about your old aunt haunting the house is strange and uncanny enough. But, firmly as I believe that an extraneous Spiritual Principle, or "Ent.i.ty," has the power of making itself felt by, or perceptible to, us in some way or other, this adventure of yours strikes one as being very largely tinctured with a purely material element. The footsteps, and the sighing and sobbing, might pa.s.s well enough: but that the poor old aunt deceased should go and swallow stomachic drops, as she did when she was feeling a little out of sorts in this life--well, it's too much like the lady who, when she revisited the glimpses of the moon after death, used to scrabble outside the window like a cat shut out by accident.'

"'Now that,' said Severin, 'is just one of the regular, stereotyped ways in which we go wilfully mystifying ourselves. We admit that an extraneous Spiritual Principle can affect us (apparently, at all events), by acting on our bodily senses, but we insist on giving said spiritual principle a certain amount of education, and on teaching it what it is proper, and what it is improper that it should do. According to your theory, my dear Marzell, a spirit may go about in slippers and sigh and sob, but it mustn't take the cork out of a bottle, or swallow any of its contents. Here it is to be observed that our own spirit, in dreams, often hangs commonplace matters out of our own imprisoned state of life on to that higher condition of being which only indicates itself dimly, even in dreams; and that it employs a great deal of irony in so doing. May not this irony, which lies so very deep in our nature (so conscious of its state of decadence from what it originally was) still exist in the soul after it has burst from the chrysalis of the body, and out of this life of dreams, when it is allowed a glance back at its discarded envelope? On this theory, the essential factor in every case of spirit-seeing is the Will of the Spiritual Ent.i.ty, and the influence exerted by it. This influence is what sends the person affected by it, though in the waking state, into the world of dreams--(though the person seeing relieves that he does so by means of his natural senses)--and it would be absurd enough were we to insist on establishing, for appearances of this sort, any particular "Norm,"

corresponding to our ideas of what ought, or ought not to be. It's worthy of remark that people who walk in their sleep, active dreamers, are often employed about the most trivial functions of life: for instance, the fellow who, on the night of full moon, always used to saddle his horse, take it out of the stable, and then lead it back, unsaddle it, and go to his bed again. However, all these matters are mere _disjecta membra_. What I really am driving at is, briefly----'

"'You believe in the old aunt then, do you?' asked Alexander, turning rather pale.

"'What is there that he doesn't believe?' said Marzell. 'And I am a true believer, too, though not such a confirmed one, perhaps. But now I'm going to tell you that I have been haunted too; and that by a much worse apparation, in the house where I'm lodging at present. I a.s.sure you it nearly frightened me to death.'

"'And I haven't been so much better off, neither,' said Severin.

"'When I got back here to Berlin the other day,' said Marzell, 'I took a nice, comfortable, well-furnished room in Friedrich Stra.s.se. Like Alexander, I was tired to death when I threw myself into bed; but I had hardly been asleep for an hour or so when I became aware of something like a bright light shining on my closed eyelids. I opened my eyes--and, fancy my horror--close beside my bed stood a tall, attenuated figure, with a face as pale as death, and frightfully distorted, staring at me fixedly with gla.s.sy-looking spectral eyes! A white shirt was hanging from the shoulders of this figure, so that its breast was bare, and seemed to be b.l.o.o.d.y. In its left hand it had a branched candlestick, with two lighted wax candles; and in its right, a tall gla.s.s full of water. Speechlessly, I kept my eyes riveted on this spectral being as it began swinging the lights and the gla.s.s in wide circles, uttering horrible, whimpering sounds as it did so. Like Alexander, I was seized by "ghost terror." Slower and slower the spectre swung the lights and the water-gla.s.s, till they came to a stop.

Then I fancied I could hear a sort of low, whispering singing in the room, and, with a curious sardonic sort of laugh, the figure went slowly away, out of the door. It was long before I could summon up courage to get up and hurriedly bolt the door, which I found I had neglected to do the night before when I went to bed. Often and often, when I was serving in the field, I have found some stranger standing beside me when I awoke; but that never frightened me at all, so that I was firmly persuaded there was something supernatural about the affair in this instance. Well, I was going downstairs next morning to talk to the landlady about what had happened in the night. As I came out on to the landing the opposite door opened and a tall attenuated figure, m.u.f.fled up in a white dressing-gown, came out meeting me. At the first glance I recognized the deadly white face and the sunken, gla.s.sy eyes I had seen at my bedside in the night. And, although I knew, now, that, if the ghost appeared again it was kickable, still, I felt a sort of echo of the terror which had been on me in the night, and was starting off downstairs as fast as I could. But the individual barred my pa.s.sage, took me politely by the hand and said, in a kindly manner, with a good-tempered smile on his face:

"'"Good-morning, dear neighbour. I trust you had a quiet night, and that nothing disturbed you?"'

"'I told him what had happened without a moment's hesitation; adding that I felt pretty certain he had been the apparition himself, and that I was glad I hadn't given him a pretty warm reception, as, from my recent experience in the field, I was, not unnaturally, rather apt to think that people who came in upon me in that sort of fashion were not exactly friendly. I added that I could scarcely be expected to answer for myself, in that respect, in the future.

"'As I said this the man kept on smiling and shaking his head; and, when I had finished, he said, very softly and gently:

"'"Well, my dear neighbour, I hope you won't be annoyed. Ay--ay--the fact is, I thought, I felt quite _sure_ it would be so, and this morning I knew it had been, I felt so well and happy, so composed and rea.s.sured in myself. You see, I'm a very anxious, nervous man: how could it be otherwise? Yes, yes: and so they say that, the day after to-morrow,--"

"'And he went on to talk about common, every-day gossip of the town, and then to other matters connected with the place, likely to be of interest to a new arrival; and all this he dished up not without a spice of irony which was entertaining enough. So, now that he began to be interesting, I went back to the events of the night, and asked him to tell me, without reserve or hesitation, what had induced him to come and wake me up in that alarming manner.

"'"Ah, my dear neighbour," he said, "I really hope you won't be much annoyed with me for taking the liberty--I'm sure I scarcely know how I could have been so bold. It was only that I was anxious to know how you were disposed towards me. I'm an exceedingly anxious, nervous man; and a new neighbour can be a very painful trial to me till I know what terms we're going to be upon."

"'I a.s.sured this extraordinary fellow that, so far, I hadn't the slightest idea what he was driving at; and then he took me by the hand, and led me into his room.

"'"Why should I hide from you, dear neighbour," he said, taking me to the window--"why should I deny, or make any secret of the miraculous power which I possess? G.o.d's strength is made perfect in our weakness; and thus it is that, to me, wretched creature that I am, exposed without shield to all the fiery darts of the adversary, has been vouchsafed, as a means of help and protection, the miraculous power of seeing, under certain conditions, into the hearts of men, and reading their inmost thoughts. I take up this clear, bright vessel, containing distilled water" (he took a tall drinking-gla.s.s from the window-sill, it was the same he had had in the night), "I fix my thoughts and concentrate my will upon the person whose heart I wish to read, and I swing the gla.s.s to and fro, observing certain prescribed oscillations, known only to myself. Presently little bubbles begin to move up and down in the water, throwing reflections, something like the back of a looking-gla.s.s, and by-and-by, as I look at them, I seem to see, as it were, my own inner spirit reflected in them, perceptibly and legibly, although a higher consciousness recognizes the image and its reflection as that of the person upon whom I am exerting my will. Often, when the propinquity of a stranger, as yet uninvestigated, makes me over anxious and uneasy, it chances that I make an experiment in the night; and I presume this was the case last night; for I can a.s.sure you you caused me no little uneasiness yesterday evening. Oh! my dear, dear neighbour, surely I can't be wrong, surely I'm not making a mistake here: you and I spent many happy days together in Ceylon, just as nearly as possible two hundred years ago? Did we not?"

"'Then he got into all sorts of labyrinths of incoherence, and I saw well enough whom I had to do with, and got away from him as quickly as I could, though not without some difficulty.

"'When I asked the landlady about him, I found that my neighbour, who had long been a much esteemed savant and man of business, with much many-sided cultivation, had a short time before fallen into a profound _maliconia_, in which he believed that everybody was inimically disposed to him and wanted to do him some harm; till all at once he thought he had discovered the means of finding out those who were his enemies and were hostile to him; upon which he had pa.s.sed into his present tranquil and contented condition of madness with "fixed idea."

It seems he sits nearly all day at his window making experiments with his gla.s.s. His own kindly disposition is seen in the circ.u.mstance that he nearly always augurs well of the people whom he experiments upon, and when he comes across anybody whom he thinks inimical, or dubious, he is not angry, but droops into a state of quiet sadness. So that his madness is quite harmless, and his elder brother, who manages his affairs, can let him live wherever he chooses, and has no occasion to give himself any trouble about him.'

"'So that your ghost,' said Severin, 'belongs to the category of those in Wagner's "Book of Apparitions," inasmuch as your explanation--to the effect that it was due to natural causes, and was chiefly the result of your own imagination--comes dragging in at the tail of the story, as is always the case in that most prosy of books.'

"'If nothing short of a ghost will satisfy you,' said Marzell, 'of course that is so. However, this madman of mine with whom I'm now on the most intimate terms--is a very interesting specimen; and there's only one thing connected with him that I don't altogether like, namely, that he's beginning to take to _other_ fixed ideas; for instance, that he's the King of Amboyna, and has been taken prisoner, and exhibited for money about the country, as a bird of paradise, for fifty years.

Now that sort of thing is capable of turning into a violent form of insanity. I knew a man who used to shine as the moon in the quietest and happiest madness every night, till he took it in his head that he had got to rise as the sun also, and then he broke out into the wildest violence.'

"'My dear fellows,' cried Alexander, 'is this talk for a place like this, in the middle of thousands of people in their holiday clothes, enjoying themselves in the bright sunshine? All we want to make us perfect is that Severin--who's looking much paler and more pensive than I like to see him shall have had some more terrible experience than even we have, and will tell us about it.'

"'Well,' said Severin, 'the fact is, though I haven't been seeing any ghost, still the mysterious, the supernatural, has come in contact with my life so nearly and closely, that I have been most painfully made aware of the existence of "the electric chain with which we are darkly bound."'

"I was certain,' said Alexander, 'that the strange mood he is in must be traceable to something out of the common.'

"'We shall hear strange matters now, I feel certain,' said Marzell with a laugh.

"On which Severin said:

"'If Alexander's aunt deceased takes doses of stomachic drops, if Nettelmann, the ex-private secretary--(for he's the madman, and a very old acquaintance of mine he is)--has divined Marzell's good disposition towards him in a gla.s.s of water, perhaps I may be allowed to tell you of a curious instance of foreboding, or presentiment, or call it a prescience, which I have experienced in the form of the perfume of a flower. You know that I am living at the far end of the Thiergarten, near the park-ranger's? Very well. The day of my arrival----'

"Here Severin was interrupted by an old gentleman, vary nicely dressed, who politely asked him to be kind enough to move his chair a little forward to let him pa.s.s. Severin rose, and the old gentleman, bowing courteously, led forward an elderly lady, apparently his wife. A boy of some twelve years followed them. Severin was about to sit down again, when Alexander said softly, 'Wait a moment; that young lady there seems to belong to the family, too.'

"The friends looked, and saw a wonderfully beautiful creature approaching, with hesitating steps, looking backwards over her shoulder. She seemed to be looking for some one whom she was anxious to see, or perhaps had noticed in pa.s.sing. Almost immediately a young fellow came gliding up to her through the crowd, and slipped a note into her hand, which she quickly concealed in her breast. Meanwhile, the old gentleman had taken possession of a table which some people had just left, and was telling the flying waiter (whom he had checked in his flight, and was holding tight by the flap of his jacket) at much length, and with great minuteness, what he was to go and bring. The lady was occupied in dusting the chairs, and consequently they did not observe the loitering of their daughter, who, without taking any notice of Severin (who still stood politely holding the chair to allow her to pa.s.s), made haste to rejoin her people. She sat down so that the friends were able to look straight into her wonderfully beautiful face, and dark, exquisitely 'appealing' eyes. There was something immensely attractive and irresistible in her whole being, and in all her movements. She was beautifully dressed in the latest fashions, a trifle too much dressed, perhaps, for the promenade, but still in perfect taste. The mother recognised a lady sitting a short distance off, and they rose and talked to each other; the old gentleman lighted his pipe.

The young lady took advantage of this chance to take the letter from her breast and read it hastily, and the friends saw the colour come quickly to the poor thing's cheeks, and the big tears rise in her eyes, while her bosom rose and fell with emotion. She tore the letter into little fragments, and let the wind carry them one by one away, as if each was some beautiful hope hard to relinquish. The old people came back: the father looked keenly at her tearful eyes, and seemed to be asking her what was the matter. She answered a word or two in a tone of gentle regret (the friends couldn't hear them), but, as she took out her handkerchief and held it to her cheek, they concluded she was pretending to have toothache; and therefore it struck them as strange that her father--who had a somewhat caricature-like face of irony on him--made funny grimaces, and laughed heartily.

"Neither Alexander, Severin, nor Marzell had said a word, but kept their eyes riveted on the lovely creature who had suffered such a bitter sorrow. The boy now came and sat down, and his sister changed her place so that her back was turned to our friends. This broke the spell, and Alexander, standing up, and tapping Severin on the shoulder, said: