Yet just now all his
desire was blurred by this dullness of brain that was as unaccountable
as the re-awakening of his desire. For months now he had drunk far more
than he had drunk to-day, yet evening had seen him clear-headed, acute,
master of himself, and revelling in the liberty that had come to him,
and in the cool joy of creative vision. But to-night he stumbled and
groped across the room. The neutral-coloured light of dawn awoke him, and he got up at once,
feeling still very drowsy, but in answer to some silent imperative call. The storm had altogether passed away, and a jewel of a morning star hung
in a pale heaven. His room looked strangely unfamiliar to him, his own
sensations were unfamiliar, there was a vagueness about things, a
barrier between him and the world. One desire alone possessed him, to
finish the portrait. All else, so he felt, he left to chance, or
whatever laws regulate the world, those laws which choose that a certain
thrush shall be caught by a certain cat, and choose one scapegoat out of
a thousand, and let the rest go free. Two hours later his servant called him, and found him gone from his
room. So as the morning was so fair, he went out to lay breakfast in the
shelter. The portrait was there, it had been dragged back into position
by the clematis, but it was covered with strange scratches, as if the
claws of some enraged animal or the nails perhaps of a man had furiously
attacked it. Dick Alingham was there, too, lying very still in front of
the disfigured canvas. Claws, also, or nails had attacked him, his
throat was horribly mangled by them. But his hands were covered with
paint, the nails of his fingers too were choked with it. THE BUS-CONDUCTOR


My friend, Hugh Grainger, and I had just returned from a two days’ visit
in the country, where we had been staying in a house of sinister repute
which was supposed to be haunted by ghosts of a peculiarly fearsome and
truculent sort. The house itself was all that such a house should be,
Jacobean and oak-panelled, with long dark passages and high vaulted
rooms. It stood, also, very remote, and was encompassed by a wood of
sombre pines that muttered and whispered in the dark, and all the time
that we were there a south-westerly gale with torrents of scolding rain
had prevailed, so that by day and night weird voices moaned and fluted
in the chimneys, a company of uneasy spirits held colloquy among the
trees, and sudden tattoes and tappings beckoned from the window-panes. But in spite of these surroundings, which were sufficient in themselves,
one would almost say, to spontaneously generate occult phenomena,
nothing of any description had occurred. I am bound to add, also, that
my own state of mind was peculiarly well adapted to receive or even to
invent the sights and sounds we had gone to seek, for I was, I confess,
during the whole time that we were there, in a state of abject
apprehension, and lay awake both nights through hours of terrified
unrest, afraid of the dark, yet more afraid of what a lighted candle
might show me. Hugh Grainger, on the evening after our return to town, had dined with
me, and after dinner our conversation, as was natural, soon came back to
these entrancing topics. “But why you go ghost-seeking I cannot imagine,” he said, “because your
teeth were chattering and your eyes starting out of your head all the
time you were there, from sheer fright. Or do you like being
frightened?”

Hugh, though generally intelligent, is dense in certain ways; this is
one of them. “Why, of course, I like being frightened,” I said. “I want to be made to
creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of
emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.”

“Well, the fact that neither of us saw anything,” he said, “confirms
what I have always believed.”

“And what have you always believed?”

“That these phenomena are purely objective, not subjective, and that
one’s state of mind has nothing to do with the perception that perceives
them, nor have circumstances or surroundings anything to do with them
either. Look at Osburton. It has had the reputation of being a haunted
house for years, and it certainly has all the accessories of one. Look
at yourself, too, with all your nerves on edge, afraid to look round or
light a candle for fear of seeing something! Surely there was the right
man in the right place then, if ghosts are subjective.”

He got up and lit a cigarette, and looking at him--Hugh is about six
feet high, and as broad as he is long--I felt a retort on my lips, for I
could not help my mind going back to a certain period in his life, when,
from some cause which, as far as I knew, he had never told anybody, he
had become a mere quivering mass of disordered nerves. Oddly enough, at
the same moment and for the first time, he began, to speak of it
himself. “You may reply that it was not worth my while to go either,” he said,
“because I was so clearly the wrong man in the wrong place. But I
wasn’t. You for all your apprehensions and expectancy have never seen a
ghost. But I have, though I am the last person in the world you would
have thought likely to do so, and, though my nerves are steady enough
again now, it knocked me all to bits.”

He sat down again in his chair. “No doubt you remember my going to bits,” he said, “and since I believe
that I am sound again now, I should rather like to tell you about it. But before I couldn’t; I couldn’t speak of it at all to anybody. Yet
there ought to have been nothing frightening about it; what I saw was
certainly a most useful and friendly ghost. But it came from the shaded
side of things; it looked suddenly out of the night and the mystery with
which life is surrounded.”

“I want first to tell you quite shortly my theory about ghost-seeing,”
he continued, “and I can explain it best by a simile, an image. Imagine
then that you and I and everybody in the world are like people whose eye
is directly opposite a little tiny hole in a sheet of cardboard which is
continually shifting and revolving and moving about. Back to back with
that sheet of cardboard is another, which also, by laws of its own, is
in perpetual but independent motion. In it too there is another hole,
and when, fortuitously it would seem, these two holes, the one through
which we are always looking, and the other in the spiritual plane, come
opposite one another, we see through, and then only do the sights and
sounds of the spiritual world become visible or audible to us. With most
people these holes never come opposite each other during their life. But
at the hour of death they do, and then they remain stationary. That, I
fancy, is how we ‘pass over.’

“Now, in some natures, these holes are comparatively large, and are
constantly coming into opposition. Clairvoyants, mediums are like that. But, as far as I knew, I had no clairvoyant or mediumistic powers at
all. I therefore am the sort of person who long ago made up his mind
that he never would see a ghost.