Tales of Men and Ghosts

DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the passage of time.  Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in retrospect, could only phrase it:  “I floated … floated. ...”

The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had voluntarily disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be reported to an inattentive world; and that now he had come back to see what that world had made of him.

“You’ll hardly believe it of me; I hardly believe it of myself; but I went away in a rage of disappointment, of wounded pride—­no, vanity!  I don’t know which cut deepest—­the sneers or the silence—­but between them, there wasn’t an inch of me that wasn’t raw.  I had just the one thing in me:  the message, the cry, the revelation.  But nobody saw and nobody listened.  Nobody wanted what I had to give.  I was like a poor devil of a tramp looking for shelter on a bitter night, in a town with every door bolted and all the windows dark.  And suddenly I felt that the easiest thing would be to lie down and go to sleep in the snow.  Perhaps I’d a vague notion that if they found me there at daylight, frozen stiff, the pathetic spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of remorse. ...  So I took care to be found!  Well, a good many thousand people die every day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered that I was simply one of the thousands; and when I made that discovery I really died—­and stayed dead a year or two. ...  When I came to life again I was off on the under side of the world, in regions unaware of what we know as ‘the public.’  Have you any notion how it shifts the point of view to wake under new constellations?  I advise any who’s been in love with a woman under Cassiopeia to go and think about her under the Southern Cross. ...  It’s the only way to tell the pivotal truths from the others. ...  I didn’t believe in my theory any less—­there was my triumph and my vindication!  It held out, resisted, measured itself with the stars.  But I didn’t care a snap of my finger whether anybody else believed in it, or even knew it had been formulated.  It escaped out of my books—­my poor still-born books—­like Psyche from the chrysalis and soared away into the blue, and lived there.  I knew then how it frees an idea to be ignored; how apprehension circumscribes and deforms it. ...  Once I’d learned that, it was easy enough to turn to and shift for myself.  I was sure now that my idea would live:  the good ones are self-supporting.  I had to learn to be so; and I tried my hand at a number of things … adventurous, menial, commercial. ...  It’s not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life—­and we nearly all manage to dodge it.  Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us—­a book or a picture or a symphony; and we’re amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization.  So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be—­if we touch earth between times—­as different from each other as those other creatures—­jellyfish, aren’t they, of a kind?—­where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness. ...

“Well, I proved my first guess, off there in the wilds, and it lived, and grew, and took care of itself.  And I said ’Some day it will make itself heard; but by that time my atoms will have waltzed into a new pattern.’  Then, in Cashmere one day, I met a fellow in a caravan, with a dog-eared book in his pocket.  He said he never stirred without it—­wanted to know where I’d been, never to have heard of it.  It was my guess—­in its twentieth edition! ...  The globe spun round at that, and all of a sudden I was under the old stars.  That’s the way it happens when the ballast of vanity shifts!  I’d lived a third of a life out there, unconscious of human opinion—­because I supposed it was unconscious of me.  But now—­now!  Oh, it was different.  I wanted to know what they said. ...  Not exactly that, either:  I wanted to know what I’d made them say.  There’s a difference. ...  And here I am,” said John Pellerin, with a pull at his pipe.

So much Bernald retained of his companion’s actual narrative; the rest was swept away under the tide of wonder that rose and submerged him as Pellerin—­at some indefinitely later stage of their talk—­picked up his manuscript and began to read.  Bernald sat opposite, his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving them to make a denser blackness in the night.  As Pellerin read, this density of blackness—­which never for a moment seemed inert or unalive—­was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and suddenly dawn was on the sea.

Something of the same nature went on in the young man’s mind while he watched and listened.  He was conscious of a gradually withdrawing light, of an interval of obscurity full of the stir of invisible forces, and then of the victorious flush of day.  And as the light rose, he saw how far he had travelled and what wonders the night had prepared.  Pellerin had been right in saying that his first idea had survived, had borne the test of time; but he had given his hearer no hint of the extent to which it had been enlarged and modified, of the fresh implications it now unfolded.  In a brief flash of retrospection Bernald saw the earlier books dwindle and fall into their place as mere precursors of this fuller revelation; then, with a leap of helpless rage, he pictured Howland Wade’s pink hands on the new treasure, and his prophetic feet upon the lecture platform.