Tales of Men and Ghosts

WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s—­the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution.  There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed.  It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham—­whose story was the slightest of the lot—­had the habit of sending our souls into the invisible.  So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his arm-chair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests.  By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics.  But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.

“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,” Murchard had once said of him.  “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark.  He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities.  His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky.  Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because some one had to do the cooking.  On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the only science which he revered as dogma.  It must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view, besides being a reason—­though not the main one—­for the fidelity of his friends.

Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less stimulating.  His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place for the exchange of ideas:  somewhat cold and draughty, but light, spacious and orderly—­a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves had fallen.  In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two neophytes were now and then added to our band.

Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend “liked ’em juicy.”  It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth.  As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence:  on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom.  And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject for experimentation.  The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a delicate glaze.  Culwin had fished him out of a thick fog of family dulness, and pulled him up to a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn’t hurt him a bit.  Indeed, the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities without robbing them of their young bloom of awe seemed to me a sufficient answer to Murchard’s ogreish metaphor.  There was nothing hectic in Frenham’s efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even a finger-tip on the sacred stupidities.  One wanted no better proof of that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.

“There’s a side of him you fellows don’t see. I believe that story about the duel!” he declared; and it was of the very essence of this belief that it should impel him—­just as our little party was dispersing—­to turn back to our host with the absurd demand:  “And now you’ve got to tell us about your ghost!”

The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham and I remained; and the vigilant servant who presided over Culwin’s destinies, having brought a fresh supply of soda-water, had been laconically ordered to bed.

Culwin’s sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that he expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight.  But Frenham’s appeal seemed to disconcert him comically, and he rose from the chair in which he had just reseated himself after his farewells in the hall.

“My ghost?  Do you suppose I’m fool enough to go to the expense of keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my friends’ closets?—­Take another cigar,” he said, revolving toward me with a laugh.

Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the chimney-piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.

“Oh,” he said, “you’d never be content to share if you met one you really liked.”

Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded in its habitual hollow, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar.

“Liked—­liked? Good Lord!” he growled.

“Ah, you have, then!” Frenham pounced on him in the same instant, with a sidewise glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered gnomelike among his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke.

“What’s the use of denying it?  You’ve seen everything, so of course you’ve seen a ghost!” his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly into the cloud.  “Or, if you haven’t seen one, it’s only because you’ve seen two!”

The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host.  He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.

“Yes,” he suddenly flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; “it’s only because I’ve seen two!”

The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a fathomless silence, while we continued to stare at each other over Culwin’s head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts.  At length Frenham, without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of the hearth, and leaned forward with his listening smile …