Twelve Stories and a Dream Part 12

"Um," said Wish.

"I suppose I wasn't on the landing a moment before he found out I was there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature young man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin. So for an instant we stood--he looking over his shoulder at me and regarded one another. Then he seemed to remember his high calling. He turned round, drew himself up, projected his face, raised his arms, spread his hands in approved ghost fashion--came towards me. As he did so his little jaw dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out 'Boo.' No, it wasn't--not a bit dreadful. I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all alone, perhaps two or three--perhaps even four or five--whiskies, so I was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been a.s.sailed by a frog. 'Boo!' I said. 'Nonsense. You don't belong to THIS place.

What are you doing here?'

"I could see him wince. 'Boo-oo,' he said.

"'Boo--be hanged! Are you a member?' I said; and just to show I didn't care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light my candle. 'Are you a member?' I repeated, looking at him sideways.

"He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became crestfallen. 'No,' he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of my eye; 'I'm not a member--I'm a ghost.'

"'Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there any one you want to see, or anything of that sort?' and doing it as steadily as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness of whisky for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned on him, holding it. 'What are you doing here?' I said.

"He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood, abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man. 'I'm haunting,' he said.

"'You haven't any business to,' I said in a quiet voice.

"'I'm a ghost,' he said, as if in defence.

"'That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This is a respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids and children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor little mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits. I suppose you didn't think of that?'

"'No, sir,' he said, 'I didn't.'

"'You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have you?

Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'

"'None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled--'

"'That's NO excuse.' I regarded him firmly. 'Your coming here is a mistake,' I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly. 'If I were you I wouldn't wait for c.o.c.k-crow--I'd vanish right away.'

"He looked embarra.s.sed. 'The fact IS, sir--' he began.

"'I'd vanish,' I said, driving it home.

"'The fact is, sir, that--somehow--I can't.'

"'You CAN'T?'

"'No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging about here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come haunting before, and it seems to put me out.'

"'Put you out?'

"'Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't come off.

There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get back.'

"That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the high, hectoring vein I had adopted. 'That's queer,' I said, and as I spoke I fancied I heard some one moving about down below. 'Come into my room and tell me more about it,' I said. 'I didn't, of course, understand this,'

and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course, you might as well have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my number, I think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms--it was lucky I was the only soul in that wing--until I saw my traps. 'Here we are,' I said, and sat down in the arm-chair; 'sit down and tell me all about it.

It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward position, old chap.'

"Well, he said he wouldn't sit down! he'd prefer to flit up and down the room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you know, something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me, and I began to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird business it was that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent--the proper conventional phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of a voice--flitting to and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old bedroom. You could see the gleam of the copper candlesticks through him, and the lights on the bra.s.s fender, and the corners of the framed engravings on the wall,--and there he was telling me all about this wretched little life of his that had recently ended on earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you know, but being transparent, of course, he couldn't avoid telling the truth."

"Eh?" said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

"What?" said Clayton.

"Being transparent--couldn't avoid telling the truth--I don't see it,"

said Wish.

"_I_ don't see it," said Clayton, with inimitable a.s.surance. "But it IS so, I can a.s.sure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed--he went down into a London bas.e.m.e.nt with a candle to look for a leakage of gas--and described himself as a senior English master in a London private school when that release occurred."

"Poor wretch!" said I.

"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.

There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations. 'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.' Engaged to be married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I suppose--when the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. 'And where are you now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'

"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue. _I_ don't know. He was much too egotistical and un.o.bservant to give me any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the Other Side of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in with a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak c.o.c.kney young men, who were on a footing of Christian names, and among these there was certainly a lot of talk about 'going haunting' and things like that. Yes--going haunting! They seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous adventure, and most of them funked it all the time. And so primed, you know, he had come."

"But really!" said Wish to the fire.

"These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly.

"I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down, with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner and sillier and more pointless than if he had been real and alive. Only then, you know, he would not have been in my bedroom here--if he HAD been alive. I should have kicked him out."

"Of course," said Evans, "there ARE poor mortals like that."

"And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of us," I admitted.

"What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was, nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a perfect mess of--and through all the wastes of eternity he never would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps--. He paused at that, and stood regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, n.o.body, not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now.

I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend, the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings, ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't you brood on these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do is to get out of this get out of this--sharp. You pull yourself together and TRY.' 'I can't,' he said. 'You try,' I said, and try he did."

"Try!" said Sanderson. "HOW?"

"Pa.s.ses," said Clayton.

"Pa.s.ses?"

"Complicated series of gestures and pa.s.ses with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!"

"But how could ANY series of pa.s.ses--?" I began.

"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, "you want EVERYTHING clear. _I_ don't know HOW. All I know is that you DO--that HE did, anyhow, at least. After a fearful time, you know, he got his pa.s.ses right and suddenly disappeared."

"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the pa.s.ses?"

"Yes," said Clayton, and seemed to think. "It was tremendously queer,"

he said. "There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made when he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the dressing-table alight, that was all--sometimes one or other would flare up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a s.p.a.ce. And queer things happened. 'I can't,' he said; 'I shall never--!' And suddenly he sat down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.

Lord! what a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!

"'You pull yourself together,' I said, and tried to pat him on the back, and... my confounded hand went through him! By that time, you know, I wasn't nearly so--ma.s.sive as I had been on the landing. I got the queerness of it full. I remember s.n.a.t.c.hing back my hand out of him, as it were, with a little thrill, and walking over to the dressing-table.

'You pull yourself together,' I said to him, 'and try.' And in order to encourage and help him I began to try as well."