The Water Ghost and Others Part 16

Come to me, O ye children, For I hear you at your play, And the questions that perplexed me Have vanished quite away.

The Poem of the Universe Nor rhythm has nor rhyme; Some G.o.d recites the wondrous song, A stanza at a time.

I dwell not now on what may be; Night shadows o'er the scene; But still my fancy wanders free Through that which might have been.

Two stanzas in the poem, the first and the last, reminded me, as did the lines on "Constancy," of something I had read before. In a moment I had placed the first as the opening lines of Longfellow's "Children," and a search through my books showed that the concluding verse was taken bodily from Peac.o.c.k's exquisite little poem "Castles in the Air."

Despairing to solve the problem that now confronted me, which was, in brief, what Bragdon meant by bodily lifting stanzas from the poets and making them over into mosaics of his own, I turned from the poems and cast my eyes over some of the bound volumes in the box.

The first of these to come to hand was a copy of _Hamlet_, bound in tree calf, the sole lettering on the book being on the back, as follows:

HAMLET Bragdon New York

This I deemed a harmless bit of vanity, and not necessarily misleading, since many collectors of books see fit to have their own names emblazoned on the backs of their literary treasures; but pray imagine my horror upon opening the volume to discover that the name of William Shakespeare had been erased from the t.i.tle-page, and that of Thomas Bragdon so carefully inserted that except to a practised eye none would ever know that the page was not as it had always been. I must confess to some mirth when I read that t.i.tle-page:

HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK A Tragedy By THOMAS BRAGDON, ESQUIRE

The conceit was well worthy of my late friend in one of his most fanciful moods. In other volumes the same subst.i.tution had been made, so that to one not versed in literature it would have seemed as though "Thomas Bragdon, Esquire," had been the author not only of _Hamlet_, but also of _Vanity Fair_, _David Copperfield_, _Rienzi_, and many other famous works, and I am not sure but that the great problem concerning the "Junius Letters" was here solved to the satisfaction of Bragdon, if not to my own.

There were but two exceptions in the box to the rule of subst.i.tuting the name of Bragdon for that of the actual author; one of these was an Old Testament, on the fly-leaf of which Bragdon had written, "To my dear friend Bragdon," and signed "The Author." I think I should have laughed for hours over this delightful reminder of my late friend's power of imagination had not the second exception come almost immediately to hand--a copy of Milton, which I recognized at once as one I had sent Tom at Christmas two years before his death, and on the fly-leaf of which I had written, "To Thomas Bragdon, with the love of, his faithfully, Philip Marsden." This was, indeed, a commonplace enough inscription, but it gathered unexpected force when I turned over a leaf and my eyes rested on the t.i.tle, where Bragdon's love of subst.i.tutes had led him to put my name where Milton's had been.

The discovery was too much for my equanimity. I was thoroughly disconcerted, almost angry, and I felt, for the first time in my life, that there had been vagaries in Bragdon's character with which I could not entirely sympathize; but in justice to myself, it must be said, these sentiments were induced by first thoughts only. Certainly there could be but one way in which Bragdon's subst.i.tution of my name for Milton's could prove injurious or offensive to me who was his friend, and that was by his putting that copy out before the world to be circulated at random, which avenue to my discomfiture he had effectually closed by leaving the book in my hands, to do with it whatsoever I pleased. Second thoughts showed me that it was only a fear of what the outsider might think that was responsible for my temporary disloyalty to my departed comrade's memory, and then when I remembered how thoroughly we twain had despised the outsider, I was so ashamed of my aberration that I immediately renewed my allegiance to the late King Tom; so heartily, in fact, that my emotions wellnigh overcame me, and I found it best to seek distractions in the outer world.

I put on my hat and took a long walk along the Riverside Drive, the crisp air of the winter night proving a tonic to my disturbed system. It was after midnight when I returned to my apartment in a tolerably comfortable frame of mind, and yet as I opened the door to my study I was filled with a vague apprehension--of what I could not determine, but which events soon justified, for as I closed the door behind me, and turned up the light over my table, I became conscious of a pair of eyes fixed upon me.

Nervously whirling about in my chair and glancing over towards my fireplace, I was for a moment transfixed with terror, for there, leaning against the mantel and gazing sadly into the fire, was Tom Bragdon himself--the man whom but a short time before I had seen lowered into his grave.

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"Tom," I cried, springing to my feet and rushing towards him--"Tom, what does this mean? Why have you come back from the spirit world to--to haunt me?"

As I spoke he raised his head slowly until his eyes rested full upon my own, whereupon he vanished, all save those eyes, which remained fixed upon mine, and filled with the soft, affectionate glow I had so often seen in them in life.

"Tom," I cried again, holding out my hand towards him in a beseeching fashion, "come back. Explain this dreadful mystery if you do not wish me to lose my senses."

And then the eyes faded from my sight, and I was alone again. Horrified by my experience, I rushed from the study into my bedroom, where I threw myself, groaning, upon my couch. To collect my scattered senses was of difficult performance, and when finally my agitated nerves did begin to a.s.sume a moderately normal state, they were set adrift once more by Tom's voice, which was unmistakably plain, bidding me to come back to him there in the study. Fearful as I was of the results, I could not but obey, and I rose tremblingly from my bed and tottered back to my desk, to see Bragdon sitting opposite my usual place just as he had so often done when in the flesh.

"Phil," he said in a moment, "don't be afraid. I couldn't hurt you if I would, and you know--or if you don't know you ought to know--that to promote your welfare has always been the supremest of my desires. I have returned to you here to-night to explain my motive in making the alterations in those books, and to account for the peculiarities of those verses. We have known each other, my dear boy, how many years?"

"Fifteen, Tom," I said, my voice husky with emotion.

"Yes, fifteen years, and fifteen happy years, Phil. Happy years to me, to whom the friendship of one who understood me was the dearest of many dear possessions. From the moment I met you I felt I had at last a friend, one to whom my very self might be confided, and who would through all time and under all circ.u.mstances prove true to that trust. It seemed to me that you were my soul's twin, Phil, and as the years pa.s.sed on and we grew closer to each other, when the rough corners of my nature adapted themselves to the curves of yours, I almost began to think that we were but one soul united in all things spiritual, two only in matters material. I never spoke of it to you; I thought of it in communion with myself; I never thought it necessary to speak of it to you, for I was satisfied that you knew. I did not realize until--until that night a fortnight since, when almost without warning I found myself on the threshold of the dark valley, that perhaps I was mistaken. I missed you, and so sudden was the attack, and so swiftly did the heralds of death intrude upon me, that I had no time to summon you, as I wished; and as I lay there upon my bed, to the watchers unconscious, it came to me, like a dash of cold water in my face, that after all we were not one, but in reality two; for had we been one, you would have known of the perilous estate of your other self, and would have been with me at the last. And, Phil, the realization that chilled my very soul, that showed me that what I most dearly loved to believe was founded in unreality, reconciled me to the journey I was about to take into other worlds, for I knew that should I recover, life could never seem quite the same to me."

Here Bragdon, or his spirit, stopped speaking for a moment, and I tried to say something, but could not.

"I know how you feel, Phil," said he, noticing my discomfiture, "for, though you are not so much a part of me that you thoroughly comprehend me, I have become so much a part of you that your innermost thoughts are as plain to me as though they were mine. But let me finish. I realized when I lay ill and about to die that I had permitted my theory of happiness to obscure my perception of the actual. As you know, my whole life has been given over to imagination--all save that portion of my existence, which I shall not dignify by calling life, when I was forced by circ.u.mstances to bring myself down to realities. I did not live whilst in commercial pursuits. It was only when I could leave business behind and travel in fancy wheresoever I wished that I was happy, and in those moments, Phil, I was full of aspiration to do those things for which nature had not fitted me, and to the extent that I recognized my inability to do those things I failed to be content. I should have liked to be a great writer, a poet, a great dramatist, a novelist--a little of everything in the literary world.

I should have liked to know Shakespeare, to have been the friend of Milton; and when I came out of my dreams it made me unhappy to think that such I never could be, until one day this idea came to me: all the happiness of life is bound up in the 'let's pretend' games which we learn in childhood, and no harm results to any one. If I can imagine myself off with my friend Phil Marsden in the lakes of England and Scotland, in the African jungle, in the moon, anywhere, and enter so far into the spirit of the trips as to feel that they are real and not imagination, why may I not in fancy be all these things that I so aspire to be? Why may not the plays of Shakespeare become the plays of Thomas Bragdon? Why may not the poems of Milton become the poems of my dearest, closest friend Phil Marsden?

What is to prevent my achieving the highest position in letters, art, politics, science, anything, in imagination? I acted upon the thought, and I found the plan worked admirably up to a certain point. It was easy to fancy myself the author of _Hamlet_, until I took my copy of that work in hand to read, and then it would shock and bring me back to earth again to see the name of another on the t.i.tle-page. My solution of this vexatious complication was soon found. Surely, thought I, it can harm no one if I choose in behalf of my own conceit to subst.i.tute my name for that of Shakespeare, and I did so. The illusion was complete; indeed, it became no illusion, for my eyes did not deceive me. I saw what existed: the t.i.tle-page of _Hamlet_ by Thomas Bragdon. I carried the plan further, and where I found a piece of literature that I admired, there I made the subst.i.tution of my name for that of the real author, and in the case of that delightful copy of Milton you gave me, Phil, it pleased me to believe that it was presented to me by the author, only the inscription on the t.i.tle-page made it necessary for me to foist upon you the burden or distinction of authorship. Then, as I lived on in my imaginary paradise, it struck me that for one who had done such great things in letters I was doing precious little writing, and I bethought me of a plan which a dreadful reality made all the more pleasing. I looked into literature to a slight extent, and I perceived at once that originality is no longer possible. The great thoughts have been thought; the great truths have been grasped and made clear; the great poems have been written. I saw that the literature of to-day is either an echo of the past or a combination of the ideas of many in the productions of the individual, and upon that basis I worked. My poems are combinations. I have taken a stanza from one poet, and combining it with a stanza from another, have made the resulting poem my own, and in so far as I have made no effort to profit thereby I have been clear in my conscience. No one has been deceived but myself, though I saw with some regret this evening when you read my lines that you were puzzled by them. I had believed that you understood me sufficiently to comprehend them."

Here my ghostly visitor paused a moment and sighed. I felt as though some explanation of my lack of comprehension early in the evening was necessary, and so I said:

"I should have understood you, Tom, and I do now, but I have not the strength of imagination that you have."

"You are wrong there, Phil," said he. "You have every bit as strong an imagination as I, but you do not keep it in form. You do not exercise it enough. How have you developed your muscles? By constant exercise. The imagination needs to be kept in play quite as much as the muscles, if we do not wish it to become flabby as the muscles become when neglected. That your imagination is a strong one is shown by my presence before you to-night. In reality, Phil, I am lying out there in Greenwood, cold in my grave. Your imagination places me here, and as applied to my books, the play of _Hamlet_ by Thomas Bragdon, and my poems, they will also demonstrate to you the strength of your fancy if you will show them, say, to your janitor, to-morrow morning. Try it, Phil, and see; but this is only a part, my boy, of what I have come here to say to you. I am here, in the main, to show you that throughout all eternity happiness may be ours if we but take advantage of our fancy. Do you take delight in my society?

Imagine me present, Phil, and I will be present. There need be no death for us, there need be no separation throughout all the years to come, if you but exercise your fancy in life, and when life on this earth ends, then shall we be reunited according to nature's laws. Good-night, Phil. It is late; and while I could sit here and talk forever without weariness, you, who have yet to put off your mortal limitations, will be worn out if I remain longer."

We shook hands affectionately, and Bragdon vanished as unceremoniously as he had appeared. For an hour after his departure I sat reflecting over the strange events of the evening, and finally, worn out in body and mind, dropped off into sleep. When I awakened it was late in the forenoon, and I was surprised when I recalled all that I had gone through to feel a sense of exhilaration. I was certainly thoroughly rested, and cares which had weighed rather heavily on me in the past now seemed light and inconsiderable. My apartments never looked so attractive, and on my table, to my utter surprise and delight, I saw several objects of art, notably a Bary-- bronze, that it had been one of my most cherished hopes to possess.

Where they came from I singularly enough did not care to discover; suffice it to say that they have remained there ever since, nor have I been at all curious to know to whose generosity I owe them, though when that afternoon I followed Bragdon's advice, and showed his book of poems and the volume of _Hamlet_ to the janitor, a vague notion as to how matters really stood entered my mind. The janitor cast his eye over the leather-covered book of poems when I asked what he thought of it.

"Nothin' much," he said. "You goin' to keep a diary?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

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"Why, when I sees people with handsome blank books like that I allus supposes that's their object."

_Blank-book indeed!_ And yet, perhaps, he was not wrong. I did not question it, but handed him the Bragdon _Hamlet_.

"Read that page aloud to me," I said, indicating the t.i.tle-page and turning my back upon him, almost dreading to hear him speak.

"Certainly, if you wish it; but aren't you feeling well this morning, Mr.

Marsden?"

"Very," I replied, shortly. "Go on and read."

"Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," he read, in a halting sort of fashion.

"Yes, yes; and what else?" I cried, impatiently.

"A Tragedy by William Shak--"

That was enough for me. I understood Tom, and at last I understood myself.

I grasped the book from the janitor's hands, rather roughly, I fear, and bade him begone.

The happiest period of my life has elapsed since then. I understand that some of my friends profess to believe me queer; but I do not care. I am content.

The world is practically mine, and Bragdon and I are always together.

THE END