‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?’ What is it? Something borne on men’s shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back. A woman’s corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says, ‘She died at midnight from the heat.’ So the city was of Death as well as Night after all.
AN INDIAN GHOST IN ENGLAND
The following story is appropriate just now, apart from the fact of the ghost’s land of birth, in the first place, because the event narrated occurred just before the last General Election, and, in the second, because Christmas approaches, when, ghosts, like oysters, are in season.
A lonely horseman – what better, or more hackeneyed, opening for a tale of blood and horror, could there be? Yet in this case the loneliness of the horseman was as undeniable as it was, for him, uncomfortable – a lonely horseman, then, was making the best of his way – and between the best and the worst of it there was very little difference: it was all so uncommonly bad – from Chester to Tarporley. Persons who know that part of England will at once acknowledge that a better line of country might be chosen for a long ride on a misty, dripping afternoon in February; and our lonely horseman, just returned from India, found affairs anything but pleasant. After splashing mile after mile along straight, unhedged roads, between stretches of sodden heather and gloomy pine-woods, past ponds and reed beds, patches of gorse, and wildernesses of alder, without meeting a single soul since he rode out of the withered, leafless landscape of the salt district, – where the sheep are as black as ink and the. grass they eat gritty with soot from the salt-mine fires, – when at last the road divided and on one side of the signboard he read ‘Tarporley 6 miles’, and on the other ‘Budworth 1/2mile’, he not unnaturally glanced longingly up the Budworth road. Through the gathering dusk he could see the twinkling lights in the village windows, could hear the cheery shouts of boys at play, and, better than all, the red glow of a fire in whatwas evidently the Inn of the village. This decided him, and he turned his horse’s head towards ‘The George’. A dinner, a fire, a bottle of wine; and after these, in true novel style, our lonely horseman sits musing alone. Perhaps the chill of his ride made him dismal; perhaps he regretted having failed to carry out his intention of dining at Tarporley. He was restless, any way, and often got up and looked out of the window.
It was a chill, cold night, with the rain-sodden mists lying white and thick over mere and glebe. A wind, rising fitfully, fills the old house with uneasy sounds, and ever and again brings the rain with a pattering rush upon the window.
The handmaid of the Inn looks in before going to bed, ‘just to see if you wanted anything, sir.’ Finding he does not, she wishes him good-night, and retires hesitatingly to the door, then turns; ‘I would no sit up tonight, master. ’Taint good to keep awake o’ nights now. Maybe ye’ld sleep and hear naught of it.’‘Naught of what?’‘Eh? ’tis more than I can tell and maybe ye’ld say ’tis the wind.’ The door closes abruptly and she is gone.
‘I wonder’, muses our cavalier, ‘what the deuce the woman is thinking there will be to hear!’ Somehow he feels attracted to the window again, and after walking once or twice across the room stands and looks out into the dark.
The rain has ceased, and something like moonlight showed faintly through the racing clouds. The wind wailed mournfully across the silent village, swinging the signboard of the Inn till it groaned like an uneasy spirit of the dead in the churchyard opposite. Beyond, the square outline of the mill rises black, but vague, above the long expanse of mere with its fringe of reeds. As the wind reaches them the alders by the mill shudder together. They almost seem to be stopping to whisper something to each other and to the willows beneath, whose weeping branches toss their weird arms down to the black water’s edge. The long ripples on the mere plash mournfully under the bank, and there is a wash and rustle among the reeds; and they, too, seem to be bending all together and to be whispering: ‘It is coming! Listen.’ Far out in the dark water the giant pike splashes suddenly to the bottom; and the eerie voice ofsome wild water-bird wails into the distance, as though it fled on swift wings from the haunted place. Then the wind itself seems to stoop and listen, with hushed breath – and far over the seep of the mere, where that ruined cottage stands, a mere speck at the edge of the waste of shimmering water, there rises fitfully through the drifting mist a long, low, melancholy echo. Not altogether unfamiliar it sounds to the listener’s ear, and carries his mind, by some connection of ideas, straight back to lonely jungle nights in India. He throws open the window and looks out. The echo swells and dies into the distance round the furthest water’s edge where the road winds into the village. ‘It is coming!’ Then the wind shudders and leaps from among the reeds and passes on, hurrying over the grass fields in their winding sheet of mist, to the open moor, to the pine-woods, anywhere away from that ruined cottage by the mere, from the churchyard with the withered yew tree at its gate.
Once, so the landlady had told our traveller as he alighted at the door, that yew had been a splendid tree, and used to toss its dense green branches in the wind like other trees; but years ago, they said, a curse had come upon it. It drooped and shrunk; and when the boughs were bare of leaves, a black and mouldering rope became apparent hanging, straight as though a heavy body hung from it, from the biggest branch. ‘Murder will out,’ the villagers said, and though an old man did aver that he had himself as a small boy fixed a swing up there and thought this might be the rope, his neighbours would have none of it. Old Cowp, they said, who used to ill-use his daughter and lived in the cottage, now a ruin, by the mere, could tell more about that rope and the use it was put to than most of us would like to hear. But Old Cowp and his daughter had long ago disappeared, none knew why or whither, suddenly, and no one took his cottage; and when the yew tree withered and the rope was seen, a moral certainty grew in the village that Cowp had done the deed of horror, and his cottage acquired an evil name and fell into a ruin. None visited it even by day. So with the yew tree. Children used to play merrily in its branches by day, and the wind sung in it cheerily by night; but for years, so they say, the wind has swept by and stirredneither twig nor rope, and the children in the evening pass it quickly. For the last month or more, too, the ‘Devil’s Dog’ had been heard in the village almost every night, coming from Old Cowp’s cottage and yelling as it rushed past the yew tree into the churchyard where it would try, and try, to dig a grave. So all the neighbours were agreed that Old Cowp was dead, and his wicked spirit had come back to haunt the scene of his former wickedness and try to dig a grave for his victim’s bones in the churchyard.
All this our traveller recollects now as he hears the wailing echo coming nearer, and he stares, not altogether comfortable in mind, out into the night. A dead silence had fallen upon the water and the land, like an oppressive, suffocating cloak. The ghostly wail grows louder and nearer. The cottagers crouch in their beds and whisper: ‘The Devil’s Dog! it is coming!’ And now, distinct and suddenly near, the howl breaks out, and, just as his door is burst open and the terrified landlady rushes in with an ‘Oh? sir, it is coming!,’ our traveller recognises the unmistakable screeching of an Indian jackal. ‘It is no ghost, my good woman, it’s a fox or some sort of wild dog. If I was in India again, I should call it a common jackal.’‘Jack ’All did you say? Why, here, Tom,’ who, more frightened than his mistress, was hovering at the door, ‘what was the name they gave to that furrin kind of wolf that got out of the wild-beast show at Tarporley last August and has never been seen since?’‘Jack ’All, they called him, mum!’
Subsequently our traveller went peacefully to bed; and next morning an investigation of Cowp’s old cottage revealed not only master Jack’s comfortable lair, but the fragments of an old letter addressed to Cowp, telling him that he had come into his brother’s farm in another county; where letters addressed by curious neighbours found him afterwards living in comfort if not in peace, with his daughter, who, so far from being murdered, had developed all her mother’s vixenis
h qualities and gave the old man – so his new neighbours averred – a terrible bad time of it.
THE PHANTOM ’RICKSHAW
‘May no ill dreams disturb my rest,
Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.’
Evening Hymn
One of the few advantages that India has over England is a certain great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province; all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official castes. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, almost every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.
Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right, have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but, none the less, to-day if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a bear nor a black sheep all houses are open to you and our small world is very kind and helpful.
Rickett of Kamartha, stayed with Polder of Kumaon, some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights only, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganised Polder’s establishment, stopped Polder’s work, and nearly died in Polder’s bed-room. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstood your wife’s amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble.
Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regularpractice, a hospital on his private account – an arrangement of loose-boxes for Incurables, his friends called it – but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is a fixed quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.
Heatherlegh is the nicest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is ‘lie low, go slow, and keep cool.’ He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. ‘Pansay went off the handle,’ says Heatheriegh, ‘after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or he may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P & O flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed itself. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him, poor devil. Write him off to the System – one man to do the work of two-and-a-half men.’
I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh was called out to visit patients and I happened to be within claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice the procession of men, women, children, and devils that was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man’s command of language. When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.
He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine style he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterwards he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I secured his manuscript before he died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885: –
My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both ere long – rest that neither the red-coated orderly nor the mid-day gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doctor’s orders, to take all the world into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on this weary earth was ever so tormented as I.
Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared tell me the like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. To-day, from Peshawar to the sea, there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who know this. His explanation is that my brain, digestion and eyesight are all slightly affected; giving rise to my frequent and persistent ‘delusions’. Delusions, indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still with the same unwearied smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly-trimmed red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered invalid. But you shall judge for yourselves.
Three years ago it was my fortune – my great misfortune – to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to knowwhat manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts. From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was conscious that Agnes’s passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and – if I may use the expression – a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognised the fact then, I do not know. Afterwards it was bitterly plain to both of us.
Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love look us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire of straw burnt itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs Wessington had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August 1882, she learnt that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly-expressed aversion, nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect.
‘Jack, darling!’ was her one eternal cuckoo-cry, ‘I’m sure it’s all a mistake – a hideous mistake; and we’ll be good friends again some day. Please forgive me, Jack, dear.’
I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance, and eventually, into blind hate – the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end.
Next year we met again at Simla – she with her monotonous face and timid attempts at reconciliation, and I with loathing of her in every fibre of my frame. Several times I could notavoid meeting her alone; and on each occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a ‘mistake’; and still the hope of eventually ‘maki
ng friends.’ I might have seen, had I cared to look, that that hope only was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me, at least, that such conduct would have driven anyone to despair. It was uncalled for, childish, unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night watches, I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a ‘delusion’. I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn’t; could I? It would have been unfair to us both.
Last year we met again – on the same terms as before. The same weary appeals, and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on, we fell apart – that is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sickroom, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled – my courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts and fears; our long rides together; my trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and now and again a vision of a white face flitting by in the rickshaw with the black and white liveries I once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs Wessington’s gloved hand; and, when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering, honestly, heartily loved her, and with my love for her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August Kitty and I were engaged. The next day I met those accursed ‘magpie’jhampanies at the back of Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs Wessington everything. She knew it already.
‘So I hear you’re engaged. Jack dear.’ Then, without a moment’s pause: ‘I’m sure it’s all a mistake – a hideous mistake. We shall be as good friends some day, Jack, as we ever were.’