Three Ghost Stories

THE HAUNTED HOUSE.

IN TWO CHAPTERS. {121}

[1859.]

THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE.

UNDER none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none

of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance

with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in

the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no

lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to

heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it direct from a

railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway

station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I

had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the

embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly

commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly

commonplace people—and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on

myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine

autumn morning.

The manner of my lighting on it was this.

I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop by

the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary residence

in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened

to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely

place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and

had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern

Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to

find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I

hadn’t been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility

of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager

by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had,

through the night—as that opposite man always has—several legs too many,

and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct

(which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a

pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had

appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and

bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking

them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering

way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he

listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his

demeanour became unbearable.

It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had

out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the

curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and

between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller and said:

“I _beg_ your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in me?”

For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or

my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.

The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if the

back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a lofty

look of compassion for my insignificance:

“In you, sir?—B.”

“B, sir?” said I, growing warm.

“I have nothing to do with you, sir,” returned the gentleman; “pray let

me listen—O.”

He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.

At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication with

the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my relief that the

gentleman might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for

(some of) whom I have the highest respect, but whom I don’t believe in.

I was going to ask him the question, when he took the bread out of my

mouth.

“You will excuse me,” said the gentleman contemptuously, “if I am too

much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all about it. I

have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in

spiritual intercourse.”

“O!” said I, somewhat snappishly.

“The conferences of the night began,” continued the gentleman, turning

several leaves of his note-book, “with this message: ‘Evil communications

corrupt good manners.’”

“Sound,” said I; “but, absolutely new?”

“New from spirits,” returned the gentleman.

I could only repeat my rather snappish “O!” and ask if I might be

favoured with the last communication.

“‘A bird in the hand,’” said the gentleman, reading his last entry with

great solemnity, “‘is worth two in the Bosh.’”

“Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I; “but shouldn’t it be Bush?”

“It came to me, Bosh,” returned the gentleman.

The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had delivered

this special revelation in the course of the night. “My friend, I hope

you are pretty well. There are two in this railway carriage. How do you

do? There are seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine spirits

here, but you cannot see them. Pythagoras is here. He is not at liberty

to mention it, but hopes you like travelling.” Galileo likewise had

dropped in, with this scientific intelligence. “I am glad to see you,

_amico_. _Come sta_? Water will freeze when it is cold enough.

_Addio_!” In the course of the night, also, the following phenomena had

occurred. Bishop Butler had insisted on spelling his name, “Bubler,” for

which offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed

as out of temper. John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had

repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint

authors of that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers

and Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England, had

described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh circle, where

he was learning to paint on velvet, under the direction of Mrs. Trimmer

and Mary Queen of Scots.

If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favoured me with these

disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the sight of the

rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent Order of the vast

Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word, I was so impatient of

them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the next station, and to

exchange these clouds and vapours for the free air of Heaven.

By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among such

leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet trees;

and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation, and thought of the

steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which they are sustained; the

gentleman’s spiritual intercourse seemed to me as poor a piece of

journey-work as ever this world saw. In which heathen state of mind, I

came within view of the house, and stopped to examine it attentively.

It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a pretty

even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the time of

George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as bad taste, as

could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of the whole quartet

of Georges. It was uninhabited, but had, within a year or two, been

cheaply repaired to render it habitable; I say cheaply, because the work

had been done in a surface manner, and was already decaying as to the

paint and plaster, though the colours were fresh. A lop-sided board

drooped over the garden wall, announcing that it was “to let on very

reasonable terms, well furnished.” It was much too closely and heavily

shadowed by trees, and, in particular, there were six tall poplars before

the front windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of

which had been extremely ill chosen.

It was easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned

by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a

mile off—a house that nobody would take. And the natural inference was,

that it had the reputation of being a haunted house.

[Picture: The haunted house]

No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so solemn

to me, as the early morning. In the summer-time, I often rise very

early, and repair to my room to do a day’s work before breakfast, and I

am always on those occasions deeply impressed by the stillness and

solitude around me. Besides that there is something awful in the being

surrounded by familiar faces asleep—in the knowledge that those who are

dearest to us and to whom we are dearest, are profoundly unconscious of

us, in an impassive state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to

which we are all tending—the stopped life, the broken threads of

yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but

abandoned occupation, all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the

hour is the tranquillity of Death. The colour and the chill have the

same association. Even a certain air that familiar household objects

take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into

the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be long ago, has its

counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of maturity or age, in

death, into the old youthful look. Moreover, I once saw the apparition

of my father, at this hour. He was alive and well, and nothing ever came

of it, but I saw him in the daylight, sitting with his back towards me,

on a seat that stood beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand,

and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed

to see him there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and

watched him. As he did not move, I spoke to him more than once. As he

did not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder,

as I thought—and there was no such thing.

For all these reasons, and for others less easily and briefly statable, I

find the early morning to be my most ghostly time. Any house would be

more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning; and a haunted house

could scarcely address me to greater advantage than then.

I walked on into the village, with the desertion of this house upon my

mind, and I found the landlord of the little inn, sanding his door-step.

I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the house.

“Is it haunted?” I asked.

The landlord looked at me, shook his head, and answered, “I say nothing.”

“Then it _is_ haunted?”

“Well!” cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness that had the

appearance of desperation—“I wouldn’t sleep in it.”

“Why not?”

“If I wanted to have all the bells in a house ring, with nobody to ring

’em; and all the doors in a house bang, with nobody to bang ’em; and all

sorts of feet treading about, with no feet there; why, then,” said the

landlord, “I’d sleep in that house.”

“Is anything seen there?”

The landlord looked at me again, and then, with his former appearance of

desperation, called down his stable-yard for “Ikey!”

The call produced a high-shouldered young fellow, with a round red face,

a short crop of sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a turned-up

nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of purple bars, with mother-of-pearl

buttons, that seemed to be growing upon him, and to be in a fair way—if

it were not pruned—of covering his head and overunning his boots.

“This gentleman wants to know,” said the landlord, “if anything’s seen at

the Poplars.”

“’Ooded woman with a howl,” said Ikey, in a state of great freshness.

“Do you mean a cry?”

“I mean a bird, sir.”

“A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me! Did you ever see her?”

“I seen the howl.”

“Never the woman?”

“Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together.”

“Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?”

“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”

“Who?”

“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”

“The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his shop?”

“Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn’t go a-nigh the place. No!”

observed the young man, with considerable feeling; “he an’t overwise,

an’t Perkins, but he an’t such a fool as _that_.”

(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins’s knowing better.)

“Who is—or who was—the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?”

“Well!” said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he scratched

his head with the other, “they say, in general, that she was murdered,

and the howl he ’ooted the while.”

This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except that

a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see, had been

took with fits and held down in ’em, after seeing the hooded woman.

Also, that a personage, dimly described as “a hold chap, a sort of

one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby, unless you challenged him

as Greenwood, and then he said, ‘Why not? and even if so, mind your own

business,’” had encountered the hooded woman, a matter of five or six

times. But, I was not materially assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch

as the first was in California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he

was confirmed by the landlord), Anywheres.

Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,

between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier of

the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and

although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them;

I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells,

creaking of boards, and such-like insignificances, with the majestic

beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted

to understand, than I had been able, a little while before, to yoke the

spiritual intercourse of my fellow-traveller to the chariot of the rising

sun. Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses—both abroad. In one of

these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation of being very

badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice abandoned on that

account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly and pleasantly:

notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms, which

were never used, and possessed, in one large room in which I sat reading,

times out of number at all hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted

chamber of the first pretensions. I gently hinted these considerations

to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a bad name, I

reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and

how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I

were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking, old

drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he

would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this

wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to

confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in my life.

To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted

house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after breakfast, I

got the keys from Perkins’s brother-in-law (a whip and harness maker, who

keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to a most rigorous wife of

the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion), and went up to the

house, attended by my landlord and by Ikey.

Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The slowly

changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the

last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and

ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a

flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable

decay which settles on all the work of man’s hands whenever it’s not

turned to man’s account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and

too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of

passage intervened between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and

there was a mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a

murderous trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row

of bells. One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded

white letters, MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the

most.

“Who was Master B.?” I asked. “Is it known what he did while the owl

hooted?”

“Rang the bell,” said Ikey.

I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young man

pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a loud,

unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The other bells

were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to which their wires

were conducted: as “Picture Room,” “Double Room,” “Clock Room,” and the

like. Following Master B.’s bell to its source I found that young

gentleman to have had but indifferent third-class accommodation in a

triangular cabin under the cock-loft, with a corner fireplace which

Master B. must have been exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm

himself at, and a corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the

ceiling for Tom Thumb. The papering of one side of the room had dropped

down bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked

up the door. It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition,

always made a point of pulling the paper down. Neither the landlord nor

Ikey could suggest why he made such a fool of himself.

Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made

no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but sparely.

Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was

of various periods within the last half-century. I was referred to a

corn-chandler in the market-place of the county town to treat for the

house. I went that day, and I took it for six months.

It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden sister

(I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very handsome,

sensible, and engaging). We took with us, a deaf stable-man, my

bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person called an Odd

Girl. I have reason to record of the attendant last enumerated, who was

one of the Saint Lawrence’s Union Female Orphans, that she was a fatal

mistake and a disastrous engagement.

The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold

day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most

depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of intellect)

burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested that her silver

watch might be delivered over to her sister (2 Tuppintock’s Gardens,

Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of anything happening to her

from the damp. Streaker, the housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was

the greater martyr. The Odd Girl, who had never been in the country,

alone was pleased, and made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the

garden outside the scullery window, and rearing an oak.

We went, before dark, through all the natural—as opposed to

supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports

ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended

from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander

(which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it is), there was

nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last people must

have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the landlord be? Through

these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful and exemplary. But within

four hours after dark we had got into a supernatural groove, and the Odd

Girl had seen “Eyes,” and was in hysterics.

My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to ourselves,

and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left Ikey, when he

helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or any one of them, for

one minute. Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd Girl had “seen Eyes” (no

other explanation could ever be drawn from her), before nine, and by ten

o’clock had had as much vinegar applied to her as would pickle a handsome

salmon.

I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under these

untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o’clock Master B.’s bell

began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk howled until the

house resounded with his lamentations!

I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the

mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory of

Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats, or wind,

or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one cause, sometimes

another, and sometimes by collusion, I don’t know; but, certain it is,

that it did ring two nights out of three, until I conceived the happy

idea of twisting Master B.’s neck—in other words, breaking his bell short

off—and silencing that young gentleman, as to my experience and belief,

for ever.

But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of

catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very

inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with

unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants

in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.’s

room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.’s bell away and balked the

ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and

died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most

unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a

birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of

existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I

was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting

the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I

say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in

such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd

Girl’s suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among us

like a parochial petrifaction.

Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most discomfiting

nature. I am unable to say whether she was of an unusually lymphatic

temperament, or what else was the matter with her, but this young woman

became a mere Distillery for the production of the largest and most

transparent tears I ever met with. Combined with these characteristics,

was a peculiar tenacity of hold in those specimens, so that they didn’t

fall, but hung upon her face and nose. In this condition, and mildly and

deplorably shaking her head, her silence would throw me more heavily than

the Admirable Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a

purse of money. Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion as with

a garment, by neatly winding up the session with the protest that the

Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating her last wishes

regarding her silver watch.

As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us,

and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded woman? According

to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of hooded women. Noises?

With that contagion downstairs, I myself have sat in the dismal parlour,

listening, until I have heard so many and such strange noises, that they

would have chilled my blood if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make

discoveries. Try this in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your

own comfortable fire-side, in the life of the night. You can fill any

house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in

your nervous system.

I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and there is

no such contagion under the sky. The women (their noses in a chronic

state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always primed and loaded

for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-triggers. The two elder

detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly

hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures

by coming back cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark,

we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took

place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go

about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is

called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.

It was in vain to do anything. It was in vain to be frightened, for the

moment in one’s own person, by a real owl, and then to show the owl. It

was in vain to discover, by striking an accidental discord on the piano,

that Turk always howled at particular notes and combinations. It was in

vain to be a Rhadamanthus with the bells, and if an unfortunate bell rang

without leave, to have it down inexorably and silence it. It was in vain

to fire up chimneys, let torches down the well, charge furiously into

suspected rooms and recesses. We changed servants, and it was no better.

The new set ran away, and a third set came, and it was no better. At

last, our comfortable housekeeping got to be so disorganised and

wretched, that I one night dejectedly said to my sister: “Patty, I begin

to despair of our getting people to go on with us here, and I think we

must give this up.”

My sister, who is a woman of immense spirit, replied, “No, John, don’t

give it up. Don’t be beaten, John. There is another way.”

“And what is that?” said I.

“John,” returned my sister, “if we are not to be driven out of this

house, and that for no reason whatever, that is apparent to you or me, we

must help ourselves and take the house wholly and solely into our own

hands.”

“But, the servants,” said I.

“Have no servants,” said my sister, boldly.

Like most people in my grade of life, I had never thought of the

possibility of going on without those faithful obstructions. The notion

was so new to me when suggested, that I looked very doubtful. “We know

they come here to be frightened and infect one another, and we know they

are frightened and do infect one another,” said my sister.

“With the exception of Bottles,” I observed, in a meditative tone.

(The deaf stable-man. I kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a

phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched in England.)

“To be sure, John,” assented my sister; “except Bottles. And what does

that go to prove? Bottles talks to nobody, and hears nobody unless he is

absolutely roared at, and what alarm has Bottles ever given, or taken!

None.”

This was perfectly true; the individual in question having retired, every

night at ten o’clock, to his bed over the coach-house, with no other

company than a pitchfork and a pail of water. That the pail of water

would have been over me, and the pitchfork through me, if I had put

myself without announcement in Bottles’s way after that minute, I had

deposited in my own mind as a fact worth remembering. Neither had

Bottles ever taken the least notice of any of our many uproars. An

imperturbable and speechless man, he had sat at his supper, with Streaker

present in a swoon, and the Odd Girl marble, and had only put another

potato in his cheek, or profited by the general misery to help himself to

beefsteak pie.

“And so,” continued my sister, “I exempt Bottles. And considering, John,

that the house is too large, and perhaps too lonely, to be kept well in

hand by Bottles, you, and me, I propose that we cast about among our

friends for a certain selected number of the most reliable and

willing—form a Society here for three months—wait upon ourselves and one

another—live cheerfully and socially—and see what happens.”

I was so charmed with my sister, that I embraced her on the spot, and

went into her plan with the greatest ardour.

We were then in the third week of November; but, we took our measures so

vigorously, and were so well seconded by the friends in whom we confided,

that there was still a week of the month unexpired, when our party all

came down together merrily, and mustered in the haunted house.

I will mention, in this place, two small changes that I made while my

sister and I were yet alone. It occurring to me as not improbable that

Turk howled in the house at night, partly because he wanted to get out of

it, I stationed him in his kennel outside, but unchained; and I seriously

warned the village that any man who came in his way must not expect to

leave him without a rip in his own throat. I then casually asked Ikey if

he were a judge of a gun? On his saying, “Yes, sir, I knows a good gun

when I sees her,” I begged the favour of his stepping up to the house and

looking at mine.

“_She’s_ a true one, sir,” said Ikey, after inspecting a double-barrelled

rifle that I bought in New York a few years ago. “No mistake about

_her_, sir.”

“Ikey,” said I, “don’t mention it; I have seen something in this house.”

“No, sir?” he whispered, greedily opening his eyes. “’Ooded lady, sir?”

“Don’t be frightened,” said I. “It was a figure rather like you.”

“Lord, sir?”

“Ikey!” said I, shaking hands with him warmly: I may say affectionately;

“if there is any truth in these ghost-stories, the greatest service I can

do you, is, to fire at that figure. And I promise you, by Heaven and

earth, I will do it with this gun if I see it again!”

The young man thanked me, and took his leave with some little

precipitation, after declining a glass of liquor. I imparted my secret

to him, because I had never quite forgotten his throwing his cap at the

bell; because I had, on another occasion, noticed something very like a

fur cap, lying not far from the bell, one night when it had burst out

ringing; and because I had remarked that we were at our ghostliest

whenever he came up in the evening to comfort the servants. Let me do

Ikey no injustice. He was afraid of the house, and believed in its being

haunted; and yet he would play false on the haunting side, so surely as

he got an opportunity. The Odd Girl’s case was exactly similar. She

went about the house in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously

and wilfully, and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many

of the sounds we heard. I had had my eye on the two, and I know it. It

is not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state of

mind; I content myself with remarking that it is familiarly known to

every intelligent man who has had fair medical, legal, or other watchful

experience; that it is as well established and as common a state of mind

as any with which observers are acquainted; and that it is one of the

first elements, above all others, rationally to be suspected in, and

strictly looked for, and separated from, any question of this kind.

To return to our party. The first thing we did when we were all

assembled, was, to draw lots for bedrooms. That done, and every bedroom,

and, indeed, the whole house, having been minutely examined by the whole

body, we allotted the various household duties, as if we had been on a

gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting party, or were

shipwrecked. I then recounted the floating rumours concerning the hooded

lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had

floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old

ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a

round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able

to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had

communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them

in words. We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were

not there to be deceived, or to deceive—which we considered pretty much

the same thing—and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we would

be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out the truth.

The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises

in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door;

lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our

individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming

together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of

all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on

some remarkable provocation to break silence.

We were, in number and in character, as follows:

First—to get my sister and myself out of the way—there were we two. In

the drawing of lots, my sister drew her own room, and I drew Master B.’s.

Next, there was our first cousin John Herschel, so called after the great

astronomer: than whom I suppose a better man at a telescope does not

breathe. With him, was his wife: a charming creature to whom he had been

married in the previous spring. I thought it (under the circumstances)

rather imprudent to bring her, because there is no knowing what even a

false alarm may do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business

best, and I must say that if she had been _my_ wife, I never could have

left her endearing and bright face behind. They drew the Clock Room.

Alfred Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty

for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine,

usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room within

it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges _I_ was ever

able to make, would keep from shaking, in any weather, wind or no wind.

Alfred is a young fellow who pretends to be “fast” (another word for

loose, as I understand the term), but who is much too good and sensible

for that nonsense, and who would have distinguished himself before now,

if his father had not unfortunately left him a small independence of two

hundred a year, on the strength of which his only occupation in life has

been to spend six. I am in hopes, however, that his Banker may break, or

that he may enter into some speculation guaranteed to pay twenty per

cent.; for, I am convinced that if he could only be ruined, his fortune

is made. Belinda Bates, bosom friend of my sister, and a most

intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl, got the Picture Room. She

has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business earnestness,

and “goes in”—to use an expression of Alfred’s—for Woman’s mission,

Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that is woman’s with a

capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and ought not to be. “Most

praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper you!” I whispered to her on the

first night of my taking leave of her at the Picture-Room door, “but

don’t overdo it. And in respect of the great necessity there is, my

darling, for more employments being within the reach of Woman than our

civilisation has as yet assigned to her, don’t fly at the unfortunate

men, even those men who are at first sight in your way, as if they were

the natural oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do

sometimes spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers,

aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not _all_ Wolf and Red

Riding-Hood, but has other parts in it.” However, I digress.

Belinda, as I have mentioned, occupied the Picture Room. We had but

three other chambers: the Corner Room, the Cupboard Room, and the Garden

Room. My old friend, Jack Governor, “slung his hammock,” as he called

it, in the Corner Room. I have always regarded Jack as the

finest-looking sailor that ever sailed. He is gray now, but as handsome

as he was a quarter of a century ago—nay, handsomer. A portly, cheery,

well-built figure of a broad-shouldered man, with a frank smile, a

brilliant dark eye, and a rich dark eyebrow. I remember those under

darker hair, and they look all the better for their silver setting. He

has been wherever his Union namesake flies, has Jack, and I have met old

shipmates of his, away in the Mediterranean and on the other side of the

Atlantic, who have beamed and brightened at the casual mention of his

name, and have cried, “You know Jack Governor? Then you know a prince of

men!” That he is! And so unmistakably a naval officer, that if you were

to meet him coming out of an Esquimaux snow-hut in seal’s skin, you would

be vaguely persuaded he was in full naval uniform.

Jack once had that bright clear eye of his on my sister; but, it fell out

that he married another lady and took her to South America, where she

died. This was a dozen years ago or more. He brought down with him to

our haunted house a little cask of salt beef; for, he is always convinced

that all salt beef not of his own pickling, is mere carrion, and

invariably, when he goes to London, packs a piece in his portmanteau. He

had also volunteered to bring with him one “Nat Beaver,” an old comrade

of his, captain of a merchantman. Mr. Beaver, with a thick-set wooden

face and figure, and apparently as hard as a block all over, proved to be

an intelligent man, with a world of watery experiences in him, and great

practical knowledge. At times, there was a curious nervousness about

him, apparently the lingering result of some old illness; but, it seldom

lasted many minutes. He got the Cupboard Room, and lay there next to Mr.

Undery, my friend and solicitor: who came down, in an amateur capacity,

“to go through with it,” as he said, and who plays whist better than the

whole Law List, from the red cover at the beginning to the red cover at

the end.

I never was happier in my life, and I believe it was the universal

feeling among us. Jack Governor, always a man of wonderful resources,

was Chief Cook, and made some of the best dishes I ever ate, including

unapproachable curries. My sister was pastrycook and confectioner.

Starling and I were Cook’s Mate, turn and turn about, and on special

occasions the chief cook “pressed” Mr. Beaver. We had a great deal of

out-door sport and exercise, but nothing was neglected within, and there

was no ill-humour or misunderstanding among us, and our evenings were so

delightful that we had at least one good reason for being reluctant to go

to bed.

We had a few night alarms in the beginning. On the first night, I was

knocked up by Jack with a most wonderful ship’s lantern in his hand, like

the gills of some monster of the deep, who informed me that he “was going

aloft to the main truck,” to have the weathercock down. It was a stormy

night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my attention to its making a

sound like a cry of despair, and said somebody would be “hailing a ghost”

presently, if it wasn’t done. So, up to the top of the house, where I

could hardly stand for the wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and

there Jack, lantern and all, with Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the

top of a cupola, some two dozen feet above the chimneys, and stood upon

nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until they both

got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I thought

they would never come down. Another night, they turned out again, and

had a chimney-cowl off. Another night, they cut a sobbing and gulping

water-pipe away. Another night, they found out something else. On

several occasions, they both, in the coolest manner, simultaneously

dropped out of their respective bedroom windows, hand over hand by their

counterpanes, to “overhaul” something mysterious in the garden.

The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed

anything. All we knew was, if any one’s room were haunted, no one looked

the worse for it.

THE GHOST IN MASTER B.’S ROOM.

WHEN I established myself in the triangular garret which had gained so

distinguished a reputation, my thoughts naturally turned to Master B. My

speculations about him were uneasy and manifold. Whether his Christian

name was Benjamin, Bissextile (from his having been born in Leap Year),

Bartholomew, or Bill. Whether the initial letter belonged to his family

name, and that was Baxter, Black, Brown, Barker, Buggins, Baker, or Bird.

Whether he was a foundling, and had been baptized B. Whether he was a

lion-hearted boy, and B. was short for Briton, or for Bull. Whether he

could possibly have been kith and kin to an illustrious lady who

brightened my own childhood, and had come of the blood of the brilliant

Mother Bunch?

With these profitless meditations I tormented myself much. I also

carried the mysterious letter into the appearance and pursuits of the

deceased; wondering whether he dressed in Blue, wore Boots (he couldn’t

have been Bald), was a boy of Brains, liked Books, was good at Bowling,

had any skill as a Boxer, even in his Buoyant Boyhood Bathed from a

Bathing-machine at Bognor, Bangor, Bournemouth, Brighton, or Broadstairs,

like a Bounding Billiard Ball?

So, from the first, I was haunted by the letter B.

It was not long before I remarked that I never by any hazard had a dream

of Master B., or of anything belonging to him. But, the instant I awoke

from sleep, at whatever hour of the night, my thoughts took him up, and

roamed away, trying to attach his initial letter to something that would

fit it and keep it quiet.

For six nights, I had been worried thus in Master B.’s room, when I began

to perceive that things were going wrong.

The first appearance that presented itself was early in the morning when

it was but just daylight and no more. I was standing shaving at my

glass, when I suddenly discovered, to my consternation and amazement,

that I was shaving—not myself—I am fifty—but a boy. Apparently Master

B.!

I trembled and looked over my shoulder; nothing there. I looked again in

the glass, and distinctly saw the features and expression of a boy, who

was shaving, not to get rid of a beard, but to get one. Extremely

troubled in my mind, I took a few turns in the room, and went back to the

looking-glass, resolved to steady my hand and complete the operation in

which I had been disturbed. Opening my eyes, which I had shut while

recovering my firmness, I now met in the glass, looking straight at me,

the eyes of a young man of four or five and twenty. Terrified by this

new ghost, I closed my eyes, and made a strong effort to recover myself.

Opening them again, I saw, shaving his cheek in the glass, my father, who

has long been dead. Nay, I even saw my grandfather too, whom I never did

see in my life.

Although naturally much affected by these remarkable visitations, I

determined to keep my secret, until the time agreed upon for the present

general disclosure. Agitated by a multitude of curious thoughts, I

retired to my room, that night, prepared to encounter some new experience

of a spectral character. Nor was my preparation needless, for, waking

from an uneasy sleep at exactly two o’clock in the morning, what were my

feelings to find that I was sharing my bed with the skeleton of Master

B.!

I sprang up, and the skeleton sprang up also. I then heard a plaintive

voice saying, “Where am I? What is become of me?” and, looking hard in

that direction, perceived the ghost of Master B.

The young spectre was dressed in an obsolete fashion: or rather, was not

so much dressed as put into a case of inferior pepper-and-salt cloth,

made horrible by means of shining buttons. I observed that these buttons

went, in a double row, over each shoulder of the young ghost, and

appeared to descend his back. He wore a frill round his neck. His right

hand (which I distinctly noticed to be inky) was laid upon his stomach;

connecting this action with some feeble pimples on his countenance, and

his general air of nausea, I concluded this ghost to be the ghost of a

boy who had habitually taken a great deal too much medicine.

“Where am I?” said the little spectre, in a pathetic voice. “And why was

I born in the Calomel days, and why did I have all that Calomel given

me?”

I replied, with sincere earnestness, that upon my soul I couldn’t tell

him.

“Where is my little sister,” said the ghost, “and where my angelic little

wife, and where is the boy I went to school with?”

I entreated the phantom to be comforted, and above all things to take

heart respecting the loss of the boy he went to school with. I

represented to him that probably that boy never did, within human

experience, come out well, when discovered. I urged that I myself had,

in later life, turned up several boys whom I went to school with, and

none of them had at all answered. I expressed my humble belief that that

boy never did answer. I represented that he was a mythic character, a

delusion, and a snare. I recounted how, the last time I found him, I

found him at a dinner party behind a wall of white cravat, with an

inconclusive opinion on every possible subject, and a power of silent

boredom absolutely Titanic. I related how, on the strength of our having

been together at “Old Doylance’s,” he had asked himself to breakfast with

me (a social offence of the largest magnitude); how, fanning my weak

embers of belief in Doylance’s boys, I had let him in; and how, he had

proved to be a fearful wanderer about the earth, pursuing the race of

Adam with inexplicable notions concerning the currency, and with a

proposition that the Bank of England should, on pain of being abolished,

instantly strike off and circulate, God knows how many thousand millions

of ten-and-sixpenny notes.

The ghost heard me in silence, and with a fixed stare. “Barber!” it

apostrophised me when I had finished.

“Barber?” I repeated—for I am not of that profession.

“Condemned,” said the ghost, “to shave a constant change of

customers—now, me—now, a young man—now, thyself as thou art—now, thy

father—now, thy grandfather; condemned, too, to lie down with a skeleton

every night, and to rise with it every morning—”

(I shuddered on hearing this dismal announcement.)

“Barber! Pursue me!”

I had felt, even before the words were uttered, that I was under a spell

to pursue the phantom. I immediately did so, and was in Master B.’s room

no longer.

Most people know what long and fatiguing night journeys had been forced

upon the witches who used to confess, and who, no doubt, told the exact

truth—particularly as they were always assisted with leading questions,

and the Torture was always ready. I asseverate that, during my

occupation of Master B.’s room, I was taken by the ghost that haunted it,

on expeditions fully as long and wild as any of those. Assuredly, I was

presented to no shabby old man with a goat’s horns and tail (something

between Pan and an old clothesman), holding conventional receptions, as

stupid as those of real life and less decent; but, I came upon other

things which appeared to me to have more meaning.

Confident that I speak the truth and shall be believed, I declare without

hesitation that I followed the ghost, in the first instance on a

broom-stick, and afterwards on a rocking-horse. The very smell of the

animal’s paint—especially when I brought it out, by making him warm—I am

ready to swear to. I followed the ghost, afterwards, in a hackney coach;

an institution with the peculiar smell of which, the present generation

is unacquainted, but to which I am again ready to swear as a combination

of stable, dog with the mange, and very old bellows. (In this, I appeal

to previous generations to confirm or refute me.) I pursued the phantom,

on a headless donkey: at least, upon a donkey who was so interested in

the state of his stomach that his head was always down there,

investigating it; on ponies, expressly born to kick up behind; on

roundabouts and swings, from fairs; in the first cab—another forgotten

institution where the fare regularly got into bed, and was tucked up with

the driver.

Not to trouble you with a detailed account of all my travels in pursuit

of the ghost of Master B., which were longer and more wonderful than

those of Sinbad the Sailor, I will confine myself to one experience from

which you may judge of many.

I was marvellously changed. I was myself, yet not myself. I was

conscious of something within me, which has been the same all through my

life, and which I have always recognised under all its phases and

varieties as never altering, and yet I was not the I who had gone to bed

in Master B.’s room. I had the smoothest of faces and the shortest of

legs, and I had taken another creature like myself, also with the

smoothest of faces and the shortest of legs, behind a door, and was

confiding to him a proposition of the most astounding nature.

This proposition was, that we should have a Seraglio.

The other creature assented warmly. He had no notion of respectability,

neither had I. It was the custom of the East, it was the way of the good

Caliph Haroun Alraschid (let me have the corrupted name again for once,

it is so scented with sweet memories!), the usage was highly laudable,

and most worthy of imitation. “O, yes! Let us,” said the other creature

with a jump, “have a Seraglio.”

It was not because we entertained the faintest doubts of the meritorious

character of the Oriental establishment we proposed to import, that we

perceived it must be kept a secret from Miss Griffin. It was because we

knew Miss Griffin to be bereft of human sympathies, and incapable of

appreciating the greatness of the great Haroun. Mystery impenetrably

shrouded from Miss Griffin then, let us entrust it to Miss Bule.

We were ten in Miss Griffin’s establishment by Hampstead Ponds; eight

ladies and two gentlemen. Miss Bule, whom I judge to have attained the

ripe age of eight or nine, took the lead in society. I opened the

subject to her in the course of the day, and proposed that she should

become the Favourite.

Miss Bule, after struggling with the diffidence so natural to, and

charming in, her adorable sex, expressed herself as flattered by the

idea, but wished to know how it was proposed to provide for Miss Pipson?

Miss Bule—who was understood to have vowed towards that young lady, a

friendship, halves, and no secrets, until death, on the Church Service

and Lessons complete in two volumes with case and lock—Miss Bule said she

could not, as the friend of Pipson, disguise from herself, or me, that

Pipson was not one of the common.

Now, Miss Pipson, having curly hair and blue eyes (which was my idea of

anything mortal and feminine that was called Fair), I promptly replied

that I regarded Miss Pipson in the light of a Fair Circassian.

“And what then?” Miss Bule pensively asked.

I replied that she must be inveigled by a Merchant, brought to me veiled,

and purchased as a slave.

[The other creature had already fallen into the second male place in the

State, and was set apart for Grand Vizier. He afterwards resisted this

disposal of events, but had his hair pulled until he yielded.]

“Shall I not be jealous?” Miss Bule inquired, casting down her eyes.

“Zobeide, no,” I replied; “you will ever be the favourite Sultana; the

first place in my heart, and on my throne, will be ever yours.”

Miss Bule, upon that assurance, consented to propound the idea to her

seven beautiful companions. It occurring to me, in the course of the

same day, that we knew we could trust a grinning and good-natured soul

called Tabby, who was the serving drudge of the house, and had no more

figure than one of the beds, and upon whose face there was always more or

less black-lead, I slipped into Miss Bule’s hand after supper, a little

note to that effect; dwelling on the black-lead as being in a manner

deposited by the finger of Providence, pointing Tabby out for Mesrour,

the celebrated chief of the Blacks of the Hareem.

There were difficulties in the formation of the desired institution, as

there are in all combinations. The other creature showed himself of a

low character, and, when defeated in aspiring to the throne, pretended to

have conscientious scruples about prostrating himself before the Caliph;

wouldn’t call him Commander of the Faithful; spoke of him slightingly and

inconsistently as a mere “chap;” said he, the other creature, “wouldn’t

play”—Play!—and was otherwise coarse and offensive. This meanness of

disposition was, however, put down by the general indignation of an

united Seraglio, and I became blessed in the smiles of eight of the

fairest of the daughters of men.

The smiles could only be bestowed when Miss Griffin was looking another

way, and only then in a very wary manner, for there was a legend among

the followers of the Prophet that she saw with a little round ornament in

the middle of the pattern on the back of her shawl. But every day after

dinner, for an hour, we were all together, and then the Favourite and the

rest of the Royal Hareem competed who should most beguile the leisure of

the Serene Haroun reposing from the cares of State—which were generally,

as in most affairs of State, of an arithmetical character, the Commander

of the Faithful being a fearful boggler at a sum.

On these occasions, the devoted Mesrour, chief of the Blacks of the

Hareem, was always in attendance (Miss Griffin usually ringing for that

officer, at the same time, with great vehemence), but never acquitted

himself in a manner worthy of his historical reputation. In the first

place, his bringing a broom into the Divan of the Caliph, even when

Haroun wore on his shoulders the red robe of anger (Miss Pipson’s

pelisse), though it might be got over for the moment, was never to be

quite satisfactorily accounted for. In the second place, his breaking

out into grinning exclamations of “Lork you pretties!” was neither

Eastern nor respectful. In the third place, when specially instructed to

say “Bismillah!” he always said “Hallelujah!” This officer, unlike his

class, was too good-humoured altogether, kept his mouth open far too

wide, expressed approbation to an incongruous extent, and even once—it

was on the occasion of the purchase of the Fair Circassian for five

hundred thousand purses of gold, and cheap, too—embraced the Slave, the

Favourite, and the Caliph, all round. (Parenthetically let me say God

bless Mesrour, and may there have been sons and daughters on that tender

bosom, softening many a hard day since!)

Miss Griffin was a model of propriety, and I am at a loss to imagine what

the feelings of the virtuous woman would have been, if she had known,

when she paraded us down the Hampstead Road two and two, that she was

walking with a stately step at the head of Polygamy and Mahomedanism. I

believe that a mysterious and terrible joy with which the contemplation

of Miss Griffin, in this unconscious state, inspired us, and a grim sense

prevalent among us that there was a dreadful power in our knowledge of

what Miss Griffin (who knew all things that could be learnt out of book)

didn’t know, were the main-spring of the preservation of our secret. It

was wonderfully kept, but was once upon the verge of self-betrayal. The

danger and escape occurred upon a Sunday. We were all ten ranged in a

conspicuous part of the gallery at church, with Miss Griffin at our

head—as we were every Sunday—advertising the establishment in an

unsecular sort of way—when the description of Solomon in his domestic

glory happened to be read. The moment that monarch was thus referred to,

conscience whispered me, “Thou, too, Haroun!” The officiating minister

had a cast in his eye, and it assisted conscience by giving him the

appearance of reading personally at me. A crimson blush, attended by a

fearful perspiration, suffused my features. The Grand Vizier became more

dead than alive, and the whole Seraglio reddened as if the sunset of

Bagdad shone direct upon their lovely faces. At this portentous time the

awful Griffin rose, and balefully surveyed the children of Islam. My own

impression was, that Church and State had entered into a conspiracy with

Miss Griffin to expose us, and that we should all be put into white

sheets, and exhibited in the centre aisle. But, so Westerly—if I may be

allowed the expression as opposite to Eastern associations—was Miss

Griffin’s sense of rectitude, that she merely suspected Apples, and we

were saved.

I have called the Seraglio, united. Upon the question, solely, whether

the Commander of the Faithful durst exercise a right of kissing in that

sanctuary of the palace, were its peerless inmates divided. Zobeide

asserted a counter-right in the Favourite to scratch, and the fair

Circassian put her face, for refuge, into a green baize bag, originally

designed for books. On the other hand, a young antelope of transcendent

beauty from the fruitful plains of Camden Town (whence she had been

brought, by traders, in the half-yearly caravan that crossed the

intermediate desert after the holidays), held more liberal opinions, but

stipulated for limiting the benefit of them to that dog, and son of a

dog, the Grand Vizier—who had no rights, and was not in question. At

length, the difficulty was compromised by the installation of a very

youthful slave as Deputy. She, raised upon a stool, officially received

upon her cheeks the salutes intended by the gracious Haroun for other

Sultanas, and was privately rewarded from the coffers of the Ladies of

the Hareem.

And now it was, at the full height of enjoyment of my bliss, that I

became heavily troubled. I began to think of my mother, and what she

would say to my taking home at Midsummer eight of the most beautiful of

the daughters of men, but all unexpected. I thought of the number of

beds we made up at our house, of my father’s income, and of the baker,

and my despondency redoubled. The Seraglio and malicious Vizier,

divining the cause of their Lord’s unhappiness, did their utmost to

augment it. They professed unbounded fidelity, and declared that they

would live and die with him. Reduced to the utmost wretchedness by these

protestations of attachment, I lay awake, for hours at a time, ruminating

on my frightful lot. In my despair, I think I might have taken an early

opportunity of falling on my knees before Miss Griffin, avowing my

resemblance to Solomon, and praying to be dealt with according to the

outraged laws of my country, if an unthought-of means of escape had not

opened before me.

One day, we were out walking, two and two—on which occasion the Vizier

had his usual instructions to take note of the boy at the turnpike, and

if he profanely gazed (which he always did) at the beauties of the

Hareem, to have him bowstrung in the course of the night—and it happened

that our hearts were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the

part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer,

on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that

vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both

baseless assertions), had secretly but most pressingly invited

thirty-five neighbouring princes and princesses to a ball and supper:

with a special stipulation that they were “not to be fetched till

twelve.” This wandering of the antelope’s fancy, led to the surprising

arrival at Miss Griffin’s door, in divers equipages and under various

escorts, of a great company in full dress, who were deposited on the top

step in a flush of high expectancy, and who were dismissed in tears. At

the beginning of the double knocks attendant on these ceremonies, the

antelope had retired to a back attic, and bolted herself in; and at every

new arrival, Miss Griffin had gone so much more and more distracted, that

at last she had been seen to tear her front. Ultimate capitulation on

the part of the offender, had been followed by solitude in the

linen-closet, bread and water and a lecture to all, of vindictive length,

in which Miss Griffin had used expressions: Firstly, “I believe you all

of you knew of it;” Secondly, “Every one of you is as wicked as another;”

Thirdly, “A pack of little wretches.”

Under these circumstances, we were walking drearily along; and I

especially, with my Moosulmaun responsibilities heavy on me, was in a

very low state of mind; when a strange man accosted Miss Griffin, and,

after walking on at her side for a little while and talking with her,

looked at me. Supposing him to be a minion of the law, and that my hour

was come, I instantly ran away, with the general purpose of making for

Egypt.

The whole Seraglio cried out, when they saw me making off as fast as my

legs would carry me (I had an impression that the first turning on the

left, and round by the public-house, would be the shortest way to the

Pyramids), Miss Griffin screamed after me, the faithless Vizier ran after

me, and the boy at the turnpike dodged me into a corner, like a sheep,

and cut me off. Nobody scolded me when I was taken and brought back;

Miss Griffin only said, with a stunning gentleness, This was very

curious! Why had I run away when the gentleman looked at me?

If I had had any breath to answer with, I dare say I should have made no

answer; having no breath, I certainly made none. Miss Griffin and the

strange man took me between them, and walked me back to the palace in a

sort of state; but not at all (as I couldn’t help feeling, with

astonishment) in culprit state.

When we got there, we went into a room by ourselves, and Miss Griffin

called in to her assistance, Mesrour, chief of the dusky guards of the

Hareem. Mesrour, on being whispered to, began to shed tears. “Bless

you, my precious!” said that officer, turning to me; “your Pa’s took

bitter bad!”

I asked, with a fluttered heart, “Is he very ill?”

“Lord temper the wind to you, my lamb!” said the good Mesrour, kneeling

down, that I might have a comforting shoulder for my head to rest on,

“your Pa’s dead!”

Haroun Alraschid took to flight at the words; the Seraglio vanished; from

that moment, I never again saw one of the eight of the fairest of the

daughters of men.

I was taken home, and there was Debt at home as well as Death, and we had

a sale there. My own little bed was so superciliously looked upon by a

Power unknown to me, hazily called “The Trade,” that a brass

coal-scuttle, a roasting-jack, and a birdcage, were obliged to be put

into it to make a Lot of it, and then it went for a song. So I heard

mentioned, and I wondered what song, and thought what a dismal song it

must have been to sing!

Then, I was sent to a great, cold, bare, school of big boys; where

everything to eat and wear was thick and clumpy, without being enough;

where everybody, large and small, was cruel; where the boys knew all

about the sale, before I got there, and asked me what I had fetched, and

who had bought me, and hooted at me, “Going, going, gone!” I never

whispered in that wretched place that I had been Haroun, or had had a

Seraglio: for, I knew that if I mentioned my reverses, I should be so

worried, that I should have to drown myself in the muddy pond near the

playground, which looked like the beer.

Ah me, ah me! No other ghost has haunted the boy’s room, my friends,

since I have occupied it, than the ghost of my own childhood, the ghost

of my own innocence, the ghost of my own airy belief. Many a time have I

pursued the phantom: never with this man’s stride of mine to come up with

it, never with these man’s hands of mine to touch it, never more to this

man’s heart of mine to hold it in its purity. And here you see me

working out, as cheerfully and thankfully as I may, my doom of shaving in

the glass a constant change of customers, and of lying down and rising up

with the skeleton allotted to me for my mortal companion.

THE TRIAL FOR MURDER. {303}

I HAVE always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of

superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own

psychological experiences when those have been of a strange sort. Almost

all men are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no

parallel or response in a listener’s internal life, and might be

suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller, who should have seen some

extraordinary creature in the likeness of a sea-serpent, would have no

fear of mentioning it; but the same traveller, having had some singular

presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or

other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before he

would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in

which such subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our

experiences of these subjective things as we do our experiences of

objective creation. The consequence is, that the general stock of

experience in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in

respect of being miserably imperfect.

In what I am going to relate, I have no intention of setting up,

opposing, or supporting, any theory whatever. I know the history of the

Bookseller of Berlin, I have studied the case of the wife of a late

Astronomer Royal as related by Sir David Brewster, and I have followed

the minutest details of a much more remarkable case of Spectral Illusion

occurring within my private circle of friends. It may be necessary to

state as to this last, that the sufferer (a lady) was in no degree,

however distant, related to me. A mistaken assumption on that head might

suggest an explanation of a part of my own case,—but only a part,—which

would be wholly without foundation. It cannot be referred to my

inheritance of any developed peculiarity, nor had I ever before any at

all similar experience, nor have I ever had any at all similar experience

since.

It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain murder was

committed in England, which attracted great attention. We hear more than

enough of murderers as they rise in succession to their atrocious

eminence, and I would bury the memory of this particular brute, if I

could, as his body was buried, in Newgate Jail. I purposely abstain from

giving any direct clue to the criminal’s individuality.

When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather

to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly

hinted that any suspicion fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to

trial. As no reference was at that time made to him in the newspapers,

it is obviously impossible that any description of him can at that time

have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be

remembered.

Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that

first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with

close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had

been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a

flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it,—no word I can find is

satisfactorily descriptive,—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing

through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river.

Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so

clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief, observed the absence

of the dead body from the bed.

It was in no romantic place that I had this curious sensation, but in

chambers in Piccadilly, very near to the corner of St. James’s Street.

It was entirely new to me. I was in my easy-chair at the moment, and the

sensation was accompanied with a peculiar shiver which started the chair

from its position. (But it is to be noted that the chair ran easily on

castors.) I went to one of the windows (there are two in the room, and

the room is on the second floor) to refresh my eyes with the moving

objects down in Piccadilly. It was a bright autumn morning, and the

street was sparkling and cheerful. The wind was high. As I looked out,

it brought down from the Park a quantity of fallen leaves, which a gust

took, and whirled into a spiral pillar. As the pillar fell and the

leaves dispersed, I saw two men on the opposite side of the way, going

from West to East. They were one behind the other. The foremost man

often looked back over his shoulder. The second man followed him, at a

distance of some thirty paces, with his right hand menacingly raised.

First, the singularity and steadiness of this threatening gesture in so

public a thoroughfare attracted my attention; and next, the more

remarkable circumstance that nobody heeded it. Both men threaded their

way among the other passengers with a smoothness hardly consistent even

with the action of walking on a pavement; and no single creature, that I

could see, gave them place, touched them, or looked after them. In

passing before my windows, they both stared up at me. I saw their two

faces very distinctly, and I knew that I could recognise them anywhere.

Not that I had consciously noticed anything very remarkable in either

face, except that the man who went first had an unusually lowering

appearance, and that the face of the man who followed him was of the

colour of impure wax.

I am a bachelor, and my valet and his wife constitute my whole

establishment. My occupation is in a certain Branch Bank, and I wish

that my duties as head of a Department were as light as they are

popularly supposed to be. They kept me in town that autumn, when I stood

in need of change. I was not ill, but I was not well. My reader is to

make the most that can be reasonably made of my feeling jaded, having a

depressing sense upon me of a monotonous life, and being “slightly

dyspeptic.” I am assured by my renowned doctor that my real state of

health at that time justifies no stronger description, and I quote his

own from his written answer to my request for it.

As the circumstances of the murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger

and stronger possession of the public mind, I kept them away from mine by

knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the

universal excitement. But I knew that a verdict of Wilful Murder had

been found against the suspected murderer, and that he had been committed

to Newgate for trial. I also knew that his trial had been postponed over

one Sessions of the Central Criminal Court, on the ground of general

prejudice and want of time for the preparation of the defence. I may

further have known, but I believe I did not, when, or about when, the

Sessions to which his trial stood postponed would come on.

My sitting-room, bedroom, and dressing-room, are all on one floor. With

the last there is no communication but through the bedroom. True, there

is a door in it, once communicating with the staircase; but a part of the

fitting of my bath has been—and had then been for some years—fixed across

it. At the same period, and as a part of the same arrangement,—the door

had been nailed up and canvased over.

I was standing in my bedroom late one night, giving some directions to my

servant before he went to bed. My face was towards the only available

door of communication with the dressing-room, and it was closed. My

servant’s back was towards that door. While I was speaking to him, I saw

it open, and a man look in, who very earnestly and mysteriously beckoned

to me. That man was the man who had gone second of the two along

Piccadilly, and whose face was of the colour of impure wax.

The figure, having beckoned, drew back, and closed the door. With no

longer pause than was made by my crossing the bedroom, I opened the

dressing-room door, and looked in. I had a lighted candle already in my

hand. I felt no inward expectation of seeing the figure in the

dressing-room, and I did not see it there.

Conscious that my servant stood amazed, I turned round to him, and said:

“Derrick, could you believe that in my cool senses I fancied I saw a —”

As I there laid my hand upon his breast, with a sudden start he trembled

violently, and said, “O Lord, yes, sir! A dead man beckoning!”

Now I do not believe that this John Derrick, my trusty and attached

servant for more than twenty years, had any impression whatever of having

seen any such figure, until I touched him. The change in him was so

startling, when I touched him, that I fully believe he derived his

impression in some occult manner from me at that instant.

I bade John Derrick bring some brandy, and I gave him a dram, and was

glad to take one myself. Of what had preceded that night’s phenomenon, I

told him not a single word. Reflecting on it, I was absolutely certain

that I had never seen that face before, except on the one occasion in

Piccadilly. Comparing its expression when beckoning at the door with its

expression when it had stared up at me as I stood at my window, I came to

the conclusion that on the first occasion it had sought to fasten itself

upon my memory, and that on the second occasion it had made sure of being

immediately remembered.

I was not very comfortable that night, though I felt a certainty,

difficult to explain, that the figure would not return. At daylight I

fell into a heavy sleep, from which I was awakened by John Derrick’s

coming to my bedside with a paper in his hand.

This paper, it appeared, had been the subject of an altercation at the

door between its bearer and my servant. It was a summons to me to serve

upon a Jury at the forthcoming Sessions of the Central Criminal Court at

the Old Bailey. I had never before been summoned on such a Jury, as John

Derrick well knew. He believed—I am not certain at this hour whether

with reason or otherwise—that that class of Jurors were customarily

chosen on a lower qualification than mine, and he had at first refused to

accept the summons. The man who served it had taken the matter very

coolly. He had said that my attendance or non-attendance was nothing to

him; there the summons was; and I should deal with it at my own peril,

and not at his.

For a day or two I was undecided whether to respond to this call, or take

no notice of it. I was not conscious of the slightest mysterious bias,

influence, or attraction, one way or other. Of that I am as strictly

sure as of every other statement that I make here. Ultimately I decided,

as a break in the monotony of my life, that I would go.

The appointed morning was a raw morning in the month of November. There

was a dense brown fog in Piccadilly, and it became positively black and

in the last degree oppressive East of Temple Bar. I found the passages

and staircases of the Court-House flaringly lighted with gas, and the

Court itself similarly illuminated. I _think_ that, until I was

conducted by officers into the Old Court and saw its crowded state, I did

not know that the Murderer was to be tried that day. I _think_ that,

until I was so helped into the Old Court with considerable difficulty, I

did not know into which of the two Courts sitting my summons would take

me. But this must not be received as a positive assertion, for I am not

completely satisfied in my mind on either point.

I took my seat in the place appropriated to Jurors in waiting, and I

looked about the Court as well as I could through the cloud of fog and

breath that was heavy in it. I noticed the black vapour hanging like a

murky curtain outside the great windows, and I noticed the stifled sound

of wheels on the straw or tan that was littered in the street; also, the

hum of the people gathered there, which a shrill whistle, or a louder

song or hail than the rest, occasionally pierced. Soon afterwards the

Judges, two in number, entered, and took their seats. The buzz in the

Court was awfully hushed. The direction was given to put the Murderer to

the bar. He appeared there. And in that same instant I recognised in

him the first of the two men who had gone down Piccadilly.

If my name had been called then, I doubt if I could have answered to it

audibly. But it was called about sixth or eighth in the panel, and I was

by that time able to say, “Here!” Now, observe. As I stepped into the

box, the prisoner, who had been looking on attentively, but with no sign

of concern, became violently agitated, and beckoned to his attorney. The

prisoner’s wish to challenge me was so manifest, that it occasioned a

pause, during which the attorney, with his hand upon the dock, whispered

with his client, and shook his head. I afterwards had it from that

gentleman, that the prisoner’s first affrighted words to him were, “_At

all hazards_, _challenge that man_!” But that, as he would give no

reason for it, and admitted that he had not even known my name until he

heard it called and I appeared, it was not done.

Both on the ground already explained, that I wish to avoid reviving the

unwholesome memory of that Murderer, and also because a detailed account

of his long trial is by no means indispensable to my narrative, I shall

confine myself closely to such incidents in the ten days and nights

during which we, the Jury, were kept together, as directly bear on my own

curious personal experience. It is in that, and not in the Murderer,

that I seek to interest my reader. It is to that, and not to a page of

the Newgate Calendar, that I beg attention.

I was chosen Foreman of the Jury. On the second morning of the trial,

after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks

strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother jurymen, I found an

inexplicable difficulty in counting them. I counted them several times,

yet always with the same difficulty. In short, I made them one too many.

I touched the brother jurymen whose place was next me, and I whispered to

him, “Oblige me by counting us.” He looked surprised by the request, but

turned his head and counted. “Why,” says he, suddenly, “we are Thirt—;

but no, it’s not possible. No. We are twelve.”

According to my counting that day, we were always right in detail, but in

the gross we were always one too many. There was no appearance—no

figure—to account for it; but I had now an inward foreshadowing of the

figure that was surely coming.

The Jury were housed at the London Tavern. We all slept in one large

room on separate tables, and we were constantly in the charge and under

the eye of the officer sworn to hold us in safe-keeping. I see no reason

for suppressing the real name of that officer. He was intelligent,

highly polite, and obliging, and (I was glad to hear) much respected in

the City. He had an agreeable presence, good eyes, enviable black

whiskers, and a fine sonorous voice. His name was Mr. Harker.

When we turned into our twelve beds at night, Mr. Harker’s bed was drawn

across the door. On the night of the second day, not being disposed to

lie down, and seeing Mr. Harker sitting on his bed, I went and sat beside

him, and offered him a pinch of snuff. As Mr. Harker’s hand touched mine

in taking it from my box, a peculiar shiver crossed him, and he said,

“Who is this?”

Following Mr. Harker’s eyes, and looking along the room, I saw again the

figure I expected,—the second of the two men who had gone down

Piccadilly. I rose, and advanced a few steps; then stopped, and looked

round at Mr. Harker. He was quite unconcerned, laughed, and said in a

pleasant way, “I thought for a moment we had a thirteenth juryman,

without a bed. But I see it is the moonlight.”

Making no revelation to Mr. Harker, but inviting him to take a walk with

me to the end of the room, I watched what the figure did. It stood for a

few moments by the bedside of each of my eleven brother jurymen, close to

the pillow. It always went to the right-hand side of the bed, and always

passed out crossing the foot of the next bed. It seemed, from the action

of the head, merely to look down pensively at each recumbent figure. It

took no notice of me, or of my bed, which was that nearest to Mr.

Harker’s. It seemed to go out where the moonlight came in, through a

high window, as by an aërial flight of stairs.

Next morning at breakfast, it appeared that everybody present had dreamed

of the murdered man last night, except myself and Mr. Harker.

I now felt as convinced that the second man who had gone down Piccadilly

was the murdered man (so to speak), as if it had been borne into my

comprehension by his immediate testimony. But even this took place, and

in a manner for which I was not at all prepared.

On the fifth day of the trial, when the case for the prosecution was

drawing to a close, a miniature of the murdered man, missing from his

bedroom upon the discovery of the deed, and afterwards found in a

hiding-place where the Murderer had been seen digging, was put in

evidence. Having been identified by the witness under examination, it

was handed up to the Bench, and thence handed down to be inspected by the

Jury. As an officer in a black gown was making his way with it across to

me, the figure of the second man who had gone down Piccadilly impetuously

started from the crowd, caught the miniature from the officer, and gave

it to me with his own hands, at the same time saying, in a low and hollow

tone,—before I saw the miniature, which was in a locket,—“_I was younger

then_, _and my face was not then drained of blood_.” It also came

between me and the brother juryman to whom I would have given the

miniature, and between him and the brother juryman to whom he would have

given it, and so passed it on through the whole of our number, and back

into my possession. Not one of them, however, detected this.

At table, and generally when we were shut up together in Mr. Harker’s

custody, we had from the first naturally discussed the day’s proceedings

a good deal. On that fifth day, the case for the prosecution being

closed, and we having that side of the question in a completed shape

before us, our discussion was more animated and serious. Among our

number was a vestryman,—the densest idiot I have ever seen at large,—who

met the plainest evidence with the most preposterous objections, and who

was sided with by two flabby parochial parasites; all the three

impanelled from a district so delivered over to Fever that they ought to

have been upon their own trial for five hundred Murders. When these

mischievous blockheads were at their loudest, which was towards midnight,

while some of us were already preparing for bed, I again saw the murdered

man. He stood grimly behind them, beckoning to me. On my going towards

them, and striking into the conversation, he immediately retired. This

was the beginning of a separate series of appearances, confined to that

long room in which we were confined. Whenever a knot of my brother

jurymen laid their heads together, I saw the head of the murdered man

among theirs. Whenever their comparison of notes was going against him,

he would solemnly and irresistibly beckon to me.

It will be borne in mind that down to the production of the miniature, on

the fifth day of the trial, I had never seen the Appearance in Court.

Three changes occurred now that we entered on the case for the defence.

Two of them I will mention together, first. The figure was now in Court

continually, and it never there addressed itself to me, but always to the

person who was speaking at the time. For instance: the throat of the

murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the

defence, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own

throat. At that very moment, the figure, with its throat in the dreadful

condition referred to (this it had concealed before), stood at the

speaker’s elbow, motioning across and across its windpipe, now with the

right hand, now with the left, vigorously suggesting to the speaker

himself the impossibility of such a wound having been self-inflicted by

either hand. For another instance: a witness to character, a woman,

deposed to the prisoner’s being the most amiable of mankind. The figure

at that instant stood on the floor before her, looking her full in the

face, and pointing out the prisoner’s evil countenance with an extended

arm and an outstretched finger.

The third change now to be added impressed me strongly as the most marked

and striking of all. I do not theorise upon it; I accurately state it,

and there leave it. Although the Appearance was not itself perceived by

those whom it addressed, its coming close to such persons was invariably

attended by some trepidation or disturbance on their part. It seemed to

me as if it were prevented, by laws to which I was not amenable, from

fully revealing itself to others, and yet as if it could invisibly,

dumbly, and darkly overshadow their minds. When the leading counsel for

the defence suggested that hypothesis of suicide, and the figure stood at

the learned gentleman’s elbow, frightfully sawing at its severed throat,

it is undeniable that the counsel faltered in his speech, lost for a few

seconds the thread of his ingenious discourse, wiped his forehead with

his handkerchief, and turned extremely pale. When the witness to

character was confronted by the Appearance, her eyes most certainly did

follow the direction of its pointed finger, and rest in great hesitation

and trouble upon the prisoner’s face. Two additional illustrations will

suffice. On the eighth day of the trial, after the pause which was every

day made early in the afternoon for a few minutes’ rest and refreshment,

I came back into Court with the rest of the Jury some little time before

the return of the Judges. Standing up in the box and looking about me, I

thought the figure was not there, until, chancing to raise my eyes to the

gallery, I saw it bending forward, and leaning over a very decent woman,

as if to assure itself whether the Judges had resumed their seats or not.

Immediately afterwards that woman screamed, fainted, and was carried out.

So with the venerable, sagacious, and patient Judge who conducted the

trial. When the case was over, and he settled himself and his papers to

sum up, the murdered man, entering by the Judges’ door, advanced to his

Lordship’s desk, and looked eagerly over his shoulder at the pages of his

notes which he was turning. A change came over his Lordship’s face; his

hand stopped; the peculiar shiver, that I knew so well, passed over him;

he faltered, “Excuse me, gentlemen, for a few moments. I am somewhat

oppressed by the vitiated air;” and did not recover until he had drunk a

glass of water.

Through all the monotony of six of those interminable ten days,—the same

Judges and others on the bench, the same Murderer in the dock, the same

lawyers at the table, the same tones of question and answer rising to the

roof of the court, the same scratching of the Judge’s pen, the same

ushers going in and out, the same lights kindled at the same hour when

there had been any natural light of day, the same foggy curtain outside

the great windows when it was foggy, the same rain pattering and dripping

when it was rainy, the same footmarks of turnkeys and prisoner day after

day on the same sawdust, the same keys locking and unlocking the same

heavy doors,—through all the wearisome monotony which made me feel as if

I had been Foreman of the Jury for a vast period of time, and Piccadilly

had flourished coevally with Babylon, the murdered man never lost one

trace of his distinctness in my eyes, nor was he at any moment less

distinct than anybody else. I must not omit, as a matter of fact, that I

never once saw the Appearance which I call by the name of the murdered

man look at the Murderer. Again and again I wondered, “Why does he not?”

But he never did.

Nor did he look at me, after the production of the miniature, until the

last closing minutes of the trial arrived. We retired to consider, at

seven minutes before ten at night. The idiotic vestryman and his two

parochial parasites gave us so much trouble that we twice returned into

Court to beg to have certain extracts from the Judge’s notes re-read.

Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I

believe, had any one in the Court; the dunder-headed triumvirate, having

no idea but obstruction, disputed them for that very reason. At length

we prevailed, and finally the Jury returned into Court at ten minutes

past twelve.

The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on

the other side of the Court. As I took my place, his eyes rested on me

with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great gray

veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and

whole form. As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,” the veil collapsed, all

was gone, and his place was empty.

The Murderer, being asked by the Judge, according to usage, whether he

had anything to say before sentence of Death should be passed upon him,

indistinctly muttered something which was described in the leading

newspapers of the following day as “a few rambling, incoherent, and

half-audible words, in which he was understood to complain that he had

not had a fair trial, because the Foreman of the Jury was prepossessed

against him.” The remarkable declaration that he really made was this:

“_My Lord_, _I knew I was a doomed man_, _when the Foreman of my Jury

came into the box_. _My Lord_, _I knew he would never let me off_,

_because_, _before I was taken_, _he somehow got to my bedside in the

night_, _woke me_, _and put a rope round my neck_.”

THE SIGNAL-MAN. {312}

“HALLOA! Below there!”

When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of

his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would

have thought, considering the nature of the ground, that he could not

have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up

to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he

turned himself about, and looked down the Line. There was something

remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my

life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice,

even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep

trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry

sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all.

“Halloa! Below!”

From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising

his eyes, saw my figure high above him.

“Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?”

He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without

pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then

there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into

a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back,

as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my

height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over

the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had

shown while the train went by.

I repeated my inquiry. After a pause, during which he seemed to regard

me with fixed attention, he motioned with his rolled-up flag towards a

point on my level, some two or three hundred yards distant. I called

down to him, “All right!” and made for that point. There, by dint of

looking closely about me, I found a rough zigzag descending path notched

out, which I followed.

The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made

through a clammy stone, that became oozier and wetter as I went down.

For these reasons, I found the way long enough to give me time to recall

a singular air of reluctance or compulsion with which he had pointed out

the path.

When I came down low enough upon the zigzag descent to see him again, I

saw that he was standing between the rails on the way by which the train

had lately passed, in an attitude as if he were waiting for me to appear.

He had his left hand at his chin, and that left elbow rested on his right

hand, crossed over his breast. His attitude was one of such expectation

and watchfulness that I stopped a moment, wondering at it.

I resumed my downward way, and stepping out upon the level of the

railroad, and drawing nearer to him, saw that he was a dark, sallow man,

with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. His post was in as solitary

and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of

jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one

way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter

perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and

the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture

there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little

sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly

smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to

me, as if I had left the natural world.

Before he stirred, I was near enough to him to have touched him. Not

even then removing his eyes from mine, he stepped back one step, and

lifted his hand.

This was a lonesome post to occupy (I said), and it had riveted my

attention when I looked down from up yonder. A visitor was a rarity, I

should suppose; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped? In me, he merely saw a

man who had been shut up within narrow limits all his life, and who,

being at last set free, had a newly-awakened interest in these great

works. To such purpose I spoke to him; but I am far from sure of the

terms I used; for, besides that I am not happy in opening any

conversation, there was something in the man that daunted me.

He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel’s

mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and

then looked at me.

That light was part of his charge? Was it not?

He answered in a low voice,—“Don’t you know it is?”

The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and

the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated

since, whether there may have been infection in his mind.

In my turn, I stepped back. But in making the action, I detected in his

eyes some latent fear of me. This put the monstrous thought to flight.

“You look at me,” I said, forcing a smile, “as if you had a dread of me.”

“I was doubtful,” he returned, “whether I had seen you before.”

“Where?”

He pointed to the red light he had looked at.

“There?” I said.

Intently watchful of me, he replied (but without sound), “Yes.”

“My good fellow, what should I do there? However, be that as it may, I

never was there, you may swear.”

“I think I may,” he rejoined. “Yes; I am sure I may.”

His manner cleared, like my own. He replied to my remarks with

readiness, and in well-chosen words. Had he much to do there? Yes; that

was to say, he had enough responsibility to bear; but exactness and

watchfulness were what was required of him, and of actual work—manual

labour—he had next to none. To change that signal, to trim those lights,

and to turn this iron handle now and then, was all he had to do under

that head. Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed

to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had

shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it. He had taught

himself a language down here,—if only to know it by sight, and to have

formed his own crude ideas of its pronunciation, could be called learning

it. He had also worked at fractions and decimals, and tried a little

algebra; but he was, and had been as a boy, a poor hand at figures. Was

it necessary for him when on duty always to remain in that channel of

damp air, and could he never rise into the sunshine from between those

high stone walls? Why, that depended upon times and circumstances.

Under some conditions there would be less upon the Line than under

others, and the same held good as to certain hours of the day and night.

In bright weather, he did choose occasions for getting a little above

these lower shadows; but, being at all times liable to be called by his

electric bell, and at such times listening for it with redoubled anxiety,

the relief was less than I would suppose.

He took me into his box, where there was a fire, a desk for an official

book in which he had to make certain entries, a telegraphic instrument

with its dial, face, and needles, and the little bell of which he had

spoken. On my trusting that he would excuse the remark that he had been

well educated, and (I hoped I might say without offence) perhaps educated

above that station, he observed that instances of slight incongruity in

such wise would rarely be found wanting among large bodies of men; that

he had heard it was so in workhouses, in the police force, even in that

last desperate resource, the army; and that he knew it was so, more or

less, in any great railway staff. He had been, when young (if I could

believe it, sitting in that hut,—he scarcely could), a student of natural

philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his

opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to

offer about that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it. It was far

too late to make another.

[Picture: The signal-man]

All that I have here condensed he said in a quiet manner, with his grave,

dark regards divided between me and the fire. He threw in the word,

“Sir,” from time to time, and especially when he referred to his

youth,—as though to request me to understand that he claimed to be

nothing but what I found him. He was several times interrupted by the

little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once he had

to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make

some verbal communication to the driver. In the discharge of his duties,

I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his

discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was

done.

In a word, I should have set this man down as one of the safest of men to

be employed in that capacity, but for the circumstance that while he was

speaking to me he twice broke off with a fallen colour, turned his face

towards the little bell when it did NOT ring, opened the door of the hut

(which was kept shut to exclude the unhealthy damp), and looked out

towards the red light near the mouth of the tunnel. On both of those

occasions, he came back to the fire with the inexplicable air upon him

which I had remarked, without being able to define, when we were so far

asunder.

Said I, when I rose to leave him, “You almost make me think that I have

met with a contented man.”

(I am afraid I must acknowledge that I said it to lead him on.)

“I believe I used to be so,” he rejoined, in the low voice in which he

had first spoken; “but I am troubled, sir, I am troubled.”

He would have recalled the words if he could. He had said them, however,

and I took them up quickly.

“With what? What is your trouble?”

“It is very difficult to impart, sir. It is very, very difficult to

speak of. If ever you make me another visit, I will try to tell you.”

“But I expressly intend to make you another visit. Say, when shall it

be?”

“I go off early in the morning, and I shall be on again at ten to-morrow

night, sir.”

“I will come at eleven.”

He thanked me, and went out at the door with me. “I’ll show my white

light, sir,” he said, in his peculiar low voice, “till you have found the

way up. When you have found it, don’t call out! And when you are at the

top, don’t call out!”

His manner seemed to make the place strike colder to me, but I said no

more than, “Very well.”

“And when you come down to-morrow night, don’t call out! Let me ask you

a parting question. What made you cry, ‘Halloa! Below there!’

to-night?”

“Heaven knows,” said I. “I cried something to that effect—”

“Not to that effect, sir. Those were the very words. I know them well.”

“Admit those were the very words. I said them, no doubt, because I saw

you below.”

“For no other reason?”

“What other reason could I possibly have?”

“You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural

way?”

“No.”

He wished me good-night, and held up his light. I walked by the side of

the down Line of rails (with a very disagreeable sensation of a train

coming behind me) until I found the path. It was easier to mount than to

descend, and I got back to my inn without any adventure.

Punctual to my appointment, I placed my foot on the first notch of the

zigzag next night, as the distant clocks were striking eleven. He was

waiting for me at the bottom, with his white light on. “I have not

called out,” I said, when we came close together; “may I speak now?” “By

all means, sir.” “Good-night, then, and here’s my hand.” “Good-night,

sir, and here’s mine.” With that we walked side by side to his box,

entered it, closed the door, and sat down by the fire.

“I have made up my mind, sir,” he began, bending forward as soon as we

were seated, and speaking in a tone but a little above a whisper, “that

you shall not have to ask me twice what troubles me. I took you for some

one else yesterday evening. That troubles me.”

“That mistake?”

“No. That some one else.”

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Like me?”

“I don’t know. I never saw the face. The left arm is across the face,

and the right arm is waved,—violently waved. This way.”

I followed his action with my eyes, and it was the action of an arm

gesticulating, with the utmost passion and vehemence, “For God’s sake,

clear the way!”

“One moonlight night,” said the man, “I was sitting here, when I heard a

voice cry, ‘Halloa! Below there!’ I started up, looked from that door,

and saw this Some one else standing by the red light near the tunnel,

waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting,

and it cried, ‘Look out! Look out!’ And then again, ‘Halloa! Below

there! Look out!’ I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran

towards the figure, calling, ‘What’s wrong? What has happened? Where?’

It stood just outside the blackness of the tunnel. I advanced so close

upon it that I wondered at its keeping the sleeve across its eyes. I ran

right up at it, and had my hand stretched out to pull the sleeve away,

when it was gone.”

“Into the tunnel?” said I.

“No. I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped, and held

my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and

saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the

arch. I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal

abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light

with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop

of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both

ways, ‘An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?’ The answer came

back, both ways, ‘All well.’”

Resisting the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine, I

showed him how that this figure must be a deception of his sense of

sight; and how that figures, originating in disease of the delicate

nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have

often troubled patients, some of whom had become conscious of the nature

of their affliction, and had even proved it by experiments upon

themselves. “As to an imaginary cry,” said I, “do but listen for a

moment to the wind in this unnatural valley while we speak so low, and to

the wild harp it makes of the telegraph wires.”

That was all very well, he returned, after we had sat listening for a

while, and he ought to know something of the wind and the wires,—he who

so often passed long winter nights there, alone and watching. But he

would beg to remark that he had not finished.

I asked his pardon, and he slowly added these words, touching my arm,—

“Within six hours after the Appearance, the memorable accident on this

Line happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded were brought

along through the tunnel over the spot where the figure had stood.”

A disagreeable shudder crept over me, but I did my best against it. It

was not to be denied, I rejoined, that this was a remarkable coincidence,

calculated deeply to impress his mind. But it was unquestionable that

remarkable coincidences did continually occur, and they must be taken

into account in dealing with such a subject. Though to be sure I must

admit, I added (for I thought I saw that he was going to bring the

objection to bear upon me), men of common sense did not allow much for

coincidences in making the ordinary calculations of life.

He again begged to remark that he had not finished.

I again begged his pardon for being betrayed into interruptions.

“This,” he said, again laying his hand upon my arm, and glancing over his

shoulder with hollow eyes, “was just a year ago. Six or seven months

passed, and I had recovered from the surprise and shock, when one

morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the door, looked towards

the red light, and saw the spectre again.” He stopped, with a fixed look

at me.

“Did it cry out?”

“No. It was silent.”

“Did it wave its arm?”

“No. It leaned against the shaft of the light, with both hands before

the face. Like this.”

Once more I followed his action with my eyes. It was an action of

mourning. I have seen such an attitude in stone figures on tombs.

“Did you go up to it?”

“I came in and sat down, partly to collect my thoughts, partly because it

had turned me faint. When I went to the door again, daylight was above

me, and the ghost was gone.”

“But nothing followed? Nothing came of this?”

He touched me on the arm with his forefinger twice or thrice giving a

ghastly nod each time:—

“That very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, I noticed, at a

carriage window on my side, what looked like a confusion of hands and

heads, and something waved. I saw it just in time to signal the driver,

Stop! He shut off, and put his brake on, but the train drifted past here

a hundred and fifty yards or more. I ran after it, and, as I went along,

heard terrible screams and cries. A beautiful young lady had died

instantaneously in one of the compartments, and was brought in here, and

laid down on this floor between us.”

Involuntarily I pushed my chair back, as I looked from the boards at

which he pointed to himself.

“True, sir. True. Precisely as it happened, so I tell it you.”

I could think of nothing to say, to any purpose, and my mouth was very

dry. The wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting

wail.

He resumed. “Now, sir, mark this, and judge how my mind is troubled.

The spectre came back a week ago. Ever since, it has been there, now and

again, by fits and starts.”

“At the light?”

“At the Danger-light.”

“What does it seem to do?”

He repeated, if possible with increased passion and vehemence, that

former gesticulation of, “For God’s sake, clear the way!”

Then he went on. “I have no peace or rest for it. It calls to me, for

many minutes together, in an agonised manner, ‘Below there! Look out!

Look out!’ It stands waving to me. It rings my little bell—”

I caught at that. “Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was

here, and you went to the door?”

“Twice.”

“Why, see,” said I, “how your imagination misleads you. My eyes were on

the bell, and my ears were open to the bell, and if I am a living man, it

did NOT ring at those times. No, nor at any other time, except when it

was rung in the natural course of physical things by the station

communicating with you.”

He shook his head. “I have never made a mistake as to that yet, sir. I

have never confused the spectre’s ring with the man’s. The ghost’s ring

is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and

I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don’t wonder that

you failed to hear it. But _I_ heard it.”

“And did the spectre seem to be there, when you looked out?”

“It WAS there.”

“Both times?”

He repeated firmly: “Both times.”

“Will you come to the door with me, and look for it now?”

He bit his under lip as though he were somewhat unwilling, but arose. I

opened the door, and stood on the step, while he stood in the doorway.

There was the Danger-light. There was the dismal mouth of the tunnel.

There were the high, wet stone walls of the cutting. There were the

stars above them.

“Do you see it?” I asked him, taking particular note of his face. His

eyes were prominent and strained, but not very much more so, perhaps,

than my own had been when I had directed them earnestly towards the same

spot.

“No,” he answered. “It is not there.”

“Agreed,” said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking

how best to improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he

took up the conversation in such a matter-of-course way, so assuming that

there could be no serious question of fact between us, that I felt myself

placed in the weakest of positions.

“By this time you will fully understand, sir,” he said, “that what

troubles me so dreadfully is the question, What does the spectre mean?”

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the

fire, and only by times turning them on me. “What is the danger? Where

is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some

dreadful calamity will happen. It is not to be doubted this third time,

after what has gone before. But surely this is a cruel haunting of me.

What can I do?”

He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated

forehead.

“If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no

reason for it,” he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. “I should get

into trouble, and do no good. They would think I was mad. This is the

way it would work,—Message: ‘Danger! Take care!’ Answer: ‘What Danger?

Where?’ Message: ‘Don’t know. But, for God’s sake, take care!’ They

would displace me. What else could they do?”

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of

a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible

responsibility involving life.

“When it first stood under the Danger-light,” he went on, putting his

dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and

across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, “why not tell me

where that accident was to happen,—if it must happen? Why not tell me

how it could be averted,—if it could have been averted? When on its

second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, ‘She is going to

die. Let them keep her at home’? If it came, on those two occasions,

only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the

third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor

signal-man on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit

to be believed, and power to act?”

When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well

as for the public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose

his mind. Therefore, setting aside all question of reality or unreality

between us, I represented to him that whoever thoroughly discharged his

duty must do well, and that at least it was his comfort that he

understood his duty, though he did not understand these confounding

Appearances. In this effort I succeeded far better than in the attempt

to reason him out of his conviction. He became calm; the occupations

incidental to his post as the night advanced began to make larger demands

on his attention: and I left him at two in the morning. I had offered to

stay through the night, but he would not hear of it.

That I more than once looked back at the red light as I ascended the

pathway, that I did not like the red light, and that I should have slept

but poorly if my bed had been under it, I see no reason to conceal. Nor

did I like the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl. I see no

reason to conceal that either.

But what ran most in my thoughts was the consideration how ought I to

act, having become the recipient of this disclosure? I had proved the

man to be intelligent, vigilant, painstaking, and exact; but how long

might he remain so, in his state of mind? Though in a subordinate

position, still he held a most important trust, and would I (for

instance) like to stake my own life on the chances of his continuing to

execute it with precision?

Unable to overcome a feeling that there would be something treacherous in

my communicating what he had told me to his superiors in the Company,

without first being plain with himself and proposing a middle course to

him, I ultimately resolved to offer to accompany him (otherwise keeping

his secret for the present) to the wisest medical practitioner we could

hear of in those parts, and to take his opinion. A change in his time of

duty would come round next night, he had apprised me, and he would be off

an hour or two after sunrise, and on again soon after sunset. I had

appointed to return accordingly.

Next evening was a lovely evening, and I walked out early to enjoy it.

The sun was not yet quite down when I traversed the field-path near the

top of the deep cutting. I would extend my walk for an hour, I said to

myself, half an hour on and half an hour back, and it would then be time

to go to my signal-man’s box.

Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically

looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot

describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the

tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his

eyes, passionately waving his right arm.

The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment

I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was

a little group of other men, standing at a short distance, to whom he

seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not

yet lighted. Against its shaft, a little low hut, entirely new to me,

had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger

than a bed.

With an irresistible sense that something was wrong,—with a flashing

self-reproachful fear that fatal mischief had come of my leaving the man

there, and causing no one to be sent to overlook or correct what he

did,—I descended the notched path with all the speed I could make.

“What is the matter?” I asked the men.

“Signal-man killed this morning, sir.”

“Not the man belonging to that box?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Not the man I know?”

“You will recognise him, sir, if you knew him,” said the man who spoke

for the others, solemnly uncovering his own head, and raising an end of

the tarpaulin, “for his face is quite composed.”

“O, how did this happen, how did this happen?” I asked, turning from one

to another as the hut closed in again.

“He was cut down by an engine, sir. No man in England knew his work

better. But somehow he was not clear of the outer rail. It was just at

broad day. He had struck the light, and had the lamp in his hand. As

the engine came out of the tunnel, his back was towards her, and she cut

him down. That man drove her, and was showing how it happened. Show the

gentleman, Tom.”

The man, who wore a rough dark dress, stepped back to his former place at

the mouth of the tunnel.

“Coming round the curve in the tunnel, sir,” he said, “I saw him at the

end, like as if I saw him down a perspective-glass. There was no time to

check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he didn’t seem to

take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon

him, and called to him as loud as I could call.”

“What did you say?”

“I said, ‘Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the

way!’”

I started.

“Ah! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I

put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last;

but it was no use.”

* * * * *

Without prolonging the narrative to dwell on any one of its curious

circumstances more than on any other, I may, in closing it, point out the

coincidence that the warning of the Engine-Driver included, not only the

words which the unfortunate Signal-man had repeated to me as haunting

him, but also the words which I myself—not he—had attached, and that only

in my own mind, to the gesticulation he had imitated.

FOOTNOTES.

{121} The original has eight chapters, which will be found in _All the

Year Round_, vol. ii., old series; but those not printed here, excepting

a page at the close, were not written by Mr. Dickens.

{303} This paper appeared as a chapter “To be taken with a Grain of

Salt,” in Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions.

{312} This story appeared as a portion of the Christmas number for 1866,

“Mugby Junction,” of which other portions follow in “Barbox Brothers” and

“The Boy at Mugby.”