War and the Weird Part 2

Another wounded French soldier said to me: "When I go back to Toulon I shall have something to say to my comrades. I always thought priests were only half men, but my G.o.d! I have seen them fight. It is magnificent. A priest led us when we hesitated, I got my two wounds following him--a priest. Oh! it is truly unbelievable to think that I should follow a priest. He led us to triumph. He led me to something more. That day I knew religion was true. I saw something in his face. I saw it again when he fell wounded, and I was wounded but I could only think of him. Ah, life is droll--Now I go back to Toulon with two bad wounds and a religion. Priests--I have seen them fight, and I lie and laugh at myself and my comrades as fools for we thought of them as mere amus.e.m.e.nts for women and children. I saw priests go forward where my n.o.ble comrades held back--my n.o.ble comrades who sneer at priests. It is droll."

FIVE SKETCHES

BY R. THURSTON HOPKINS

I

OMBOS

We were talking at the club about spirit manifestations, and retailing the usual second or third-hand accounts of family spooks and deceased aunts showing themselves to their sorrowing relatives.

"It is strange the tricks which our brains will sometimes play us," said Barton. "I remember once seeing a ghost myself, and I can tell you that the sensation is a very curious one. It was a good many years ago, when I was out in Bombay in the National Indian Bank, and I had been sitting up until the early hours trying to trace some fraudulent entries in the bank's books by one of our clerks who had absconded with a considerable sum of money.

"Everybody in the bank building had long since gone home or to bed, where I ought to have been myself, so I was vastly astonished when I looked up from the ledger to see somebody sitting at the desk where I myself had been writing a few moments before. I felt quite upset for a moment, until I recognised the intruder. He was nebulous, but I could see plainly enough who it was."

"A member of your family in England?" asked Duckford, who was a firm believer in the good old-fashioned second sight of the Scotch Highlanders. Barton answered in his peculiarly quiet way.

"No, it was myself. The appearance of seeing an image of one's self is not altogether unusual, I believe. But, of course, such a thing is really all nonsense ... a matter of nerves."

"Now, I do not think it is fair of you to put all such things down to nerves," said Captain Crabbe, who had returned wounded from France after being in the field since the outbreak of the Great War. "If one cannot always explain, one need not therefore ridicule." Crabbe made this remark with a gravity that was somewhat unusual with him.

"Bless my soul, boy, you haven't been seeing the Angels of Mons or the Agincourt Bowmen over there in Flanders, have you?" asked Duckford, regarding Crabbe with a keen eye, and scenting something savouring of the mysterious, the super-natural. "Do you believe in these stories? I mean--superst.i.tions?"

Captain Crabbe shook his head. "Not greatly," he said smiling. "But I am not one of those who thoughtlessly laugh at that which is out of the common, merely because it cannot be explained on ordinary grounds. Not since I have spent nearly twelve months over in France, at any rate. Are you interested in the weird?"

"I'd be a fool if I wasn't," said Duckford, selecting a cigar from his case. "What's your story about--I see you have one to tell. I am not inquisitive as a rule; but, somehow your manner has warned me that you have something singularly interesting to tell."

Crabbe remained silent a short time. Then, looking at Duckford very earnestly, he answered:

"Well, perhaps I may tell you my story, though I would not tell it to all these heretics around me. Indeed, only two or three other people have ever heard it. I hate--ah! more than I can convey to any living soul--even to think about it. But to you it may be of special interest."

"You know that I look upon all such things from the point of a simple, unbia.s.sed inquirer," returned Duckford. "Come along, Crabbe."

"A good cigar in front of the card room fire, and your story, eh?"

Duckford led the way up to the snug card room where a cheerful fire was blazing. "Sit down. Where is that dashed waiter? Oh, you there, Griggs.

Come along with some whisky and soda."

Crabbe sat down in a deep chair by the fire, and stretched his feet to the flame. Duckford said nothing; only pulled at his cigar and patiently waited for what he knew was soon coming.

"Do you know--but, no, of course you don't," he began presently. "But can you imagine how it can be that a man could pa.s.s all his force into a bronze statue and make it live.... You've heard these literary men and artists talk about putting their souls into their work, Duckford?"

Duckford pursed his lips. "Everything lives--even a bronze statue," he said seriously. "If it was not so it would atrophy, it would crumble and disappear. Look at the case of----"

"That's just what old Ombos said. And if he didn't understand all about those things, I should jolly well like to be led to the man who did.

Ombos told me hundreds of times that a man walked about this earth throwing his force into everything he came in contact with--scattering some kind of power; and of course that power is picked up by stones and houses and ... statues, or anything. Ombos misused it; that was disastrous. It seems to me that it is safe to use this G.o.d-energy only in its own proper sphere. You have very likely heard of men who have tried to pa.s.s themselves into inanimate objects? Well, what would you say if I tell you that _I_ even _I_--who sit now so soberly before you, whom before the war you knew to be ordinarily, a quiet, peaceably-disposed, sport-loving English fellow--had once been under the spell of a bronze statue that somebody had pa.s.sed clean into?"

"You were under the hypnotic influence of your friend Ombos, probably,"

I suggested.

"You may think so, _now_; but you just wait till I have told you all about Ombos, and the bronze statue. Then you'll be able to decide if it was trickery.... It would be different if you could have seen the statue."

Then Crabbe proceeded to unfold his strange tale.

"You know that when the war first broke out I was attached to the Loamshires, and we were one of the first British Regiments to start for the land across the water. After six months' fighting, during which every day was crowded with enough incident to provide a three-reel thriller for a cinema-man, I found myself quartered at Ypres. Have you ever been to Ypres? If you have, it will act as a kind of antidote to those wretched picture post-cards which show it in its last phase--a heap of senseless wreckage. The 'Coal Boxes,' 'Jack Johnsons' and other varied presents from Krupp's had not fallen on the town with such lavishness at the time my regiment found shelter there. It was a June afternoon when I first found my way there. A mellow drowsiness hung over the Cloth Hall and Cathedral. It was indeed a very pleasant little town.

The old houses of the square, the Prior's Gate, the n.o.ble trees, the stretch of green turf, all shared in the dream-like repose. In the Rue Bar-le-Duc, as everybody knows, just where it winds around to the fine gateway of the Cathedral, there is a row of little shops with bulging leaded windows, dusty and delightful. The one that took my eye was an antique shop. I had a whole regiment of aunts and uncles at home who in every letter demanded souvenirs, and here was the chance to lodge a shipping order, with about a hundred labels, and leave the old antiquarian fogey to send 'em off. It was inside that I met Ombos for the first time. I selected the souvenirs, and wrote labels; but old Ombos made a devil of a muddle over sending them off, and a very prim maiden aunt received a snuff box adorned with a young French lady in very scanty attire.... By the way, you don't know my aunt Sylvia, do you?"

Crabbe laughed heartily for the first time that evening.

"I spent some hours in the bulging window of that old shop examining the wonderful collection of beautiful old things, and staggering about on piles of andirons and copper warming pans, old Ombos watching me all the time with an amused smile.

"I can still see Ombos standing like a figure carved in old ivory, with one skinny yellow hand resting on the edge of a black oak table.

"'I call all this stuff here rubbish; not worth looking at. But people do not understand real good stuff if I show it to 'em,' he said, and smiled a remotely contemptuous smile. 'Now if you really want to see some choice antiques ...'

"He motioned me to follow, and taking a lighted taper, led the way into a room at the back of his shop. Ombos pottered about with the taper on the end of a rod; suddenly a big overhead chandelier burst into light and I stood blinking in amazement.

"It was one of the most gorgeously furnished oak-panelled rooms I have ever seen. The floor was of black polished ebony, and strewn on the floor were priceless leopard skins and Persian rugs. There were heavy Chinese tapestries worked in crimson and gold, Tibetan devil-masks, gold candelabra, armour richly inlaid with precious stones, wondrous black oak furniture.... But I can a.s.sure you, I could continue indefinitely describing the contents of that room without giving you any adequate idea of what it was like!

"'Hardly what you expected to see, eh?' Ombos said, and there was a faint trace of mockery in his tone.

"I looked around me helplessly.

"'No!' I said, sinking into a most luxurious silk-cushioned divan.

'Trenches, and this! I suppose I'll wake up soon.'

"'Would you like to see my bronze statue of Albert of Cologne? It's the gem of my collection, and has a world-wide reputation!'

"'It's rather different, you may say.' He looked full over my head as I spoke, and following the direction of his eyes, I turned. In a dark recess in that part of the room stood a bronze statue, some six feet in height. It portrayed the great mystic in a long habit fashioned after a monkish cowl, and his hair and face reminded me of a bust of Nero I had once seen in the gallery of the Louvre. Ombos told me that the life of Albert Magnus had been written by Dr. Sighart. This Dominican, _magnus in magia_, _major in philosophia_, _maximus in theologia_, was distinguished alike for his knowledge of the black art and his great virtue, for austerity of regimen, and dislike of any form of society.

For other details of this philosopher I must refer you to Sighart's excellent monograph and Mr. James Mew's work on _The Black Art_ from which we learn that Albert of Cologne was accused by the vulgar of holding illicit commerce with the devil. They believed as a matter of course that he was aided by Beelzebub. And legends grew about him in wild luxuriance. In particular he is credited with the creation of an android, homunculus, or, as some say, a fair maiden--an idea which Goethe may have copied in his celebrated play--able, according to some, to say only 'Salve,' but, according to others, to predict with the unerring accuracy of a Zadkiel a change of government, or the advent of a pestilence, a royal marriage or a royal death. But all agree that this automaton was smashed by his pupil Thomas Aquinas, who ought to have known better than to believe it a device of the Evil One. This story of the speaking statue may go with those other marvels of his vision of the Holy Virgin to encourage him in theological study, and his stupendous garden of flowers and birds and fountains in mid-winter for William of Holland, and that gracious scent which arose after a longer time than four days out of his sacred sepulchre, and his vision of St.

Dominic, who himself revealed to him the secret of the stone, whereby he discharged all the debts of his bishopric.

"These bald facts about our friend Magnus must suffice. Old Ombos had a splendid edition of his works, lately published in Paris under the direction of a certain August Borguet; twenty large folios on all imaginable subjects. They included chapters on hawks and adhering to G.o.d, on meteors and the mystery of the Ma.s.s, on the healing of the leper and the _eau de vie_.

"I was a gross Philistine in those days--still am, as a matter of fact--and I could not appreciate the statue. A strenuous life with my Regiment had stifled what little appreciation for such things a more leisured existence might have fostered. I could not appreciate nor understand the things that Ombos was saying about the bronze statue and the strange Master of the Masters it portrayed.

"Old Ombos--you could not help but think that he had grown very much like the statue himself; or had the statue grown like him?--held up a candelabra which threw the details of the bronze figure into relief and cast flickering reflections on the dark oak panelling of the recess.

"'It's an exquisite thing,' said Ombos. 'See how he rears himself on his black granite plinth. A n.o.ble pile of mellow bronze, irregular yet graceful.' Ombos regarded it smilingly, yet with one of his queer, sinister looks. It would have been hard to know what he was thinking. He was one of those tall, emaciated chaps, that make us men of ordinary stature feel dwarfish; and as I looked at his skull-like face I wondered at first where his eyes were hidden ... they seemed so far back in the dark hollows on each side of his nose.

"I placed myself before Albert of Cologne--to try and appreciate it, you know. Well, I didn't think a great deal of it, but of course I was a Philistine. I had seen many great, heavy bronzes in the British Museum, and they hadn't even stirred my heart, so it is not surprising that this one failed to affect me. I told Ombos, merely to please him, that I thought it was an extraordinary piece of work. But he very soon saw that I was not able to appreciate old Magnus, and he drew a heavy plush curtain back in front of him.

"'Come back! Come away!' he said. 'You have not yet the understanding.