Penguin Book Of Indian Ghost Stories (3 page)

(Whilst I write, it has just occurred to me that this old soldier and his family perished in the massacre at Meerut on the tenth of May. He was, in some way, related to, or connected by marriage
with Mrs Courtenay, the keeper of the hotel, who, with her nieces was so barbarously murdered on that disastrous occasion.)

‘Why, bless my soul!’ exclaimed the old man, stooping down and picking up something, ‘If the old gentleman hasn’t shed his skin again! This is the skin of a very large snake, a cobra capella, that I have known for the last thirteen years. He must be precious old from his size, the slowness of his movements, and the bad cough he has had for the last four or five years. Last winter he was very bad indeed, and I thought he was going to die. He was then living in the ruins of old General Webster’s vault, and coughing continually, just like a man with the asthma. However, I strewed a lot of fine ashes and some bits of wool in the ruin to keep him warm by night, and some fine white sand at the entrance, upon which he used to crawl out and bask, when the sun had made it hot enough; and when the warm weather set in he got all right again.’

‘Rather a strange fancy of yours, to live upon such amicable terms with the great enemy of the human race?’

‘Well, perhaps it is. But he once bit and killed a thief who came here to rob a child’s grave of the iron railings, which its parents, contrary to my advice, had placed round it, and ever since then I have liked the snake, and have never thought of molesting him. I have had many an opportunity of killing him (if I had wished to do it) when I have caught him asleep on the tombstones, in the winter’s sun. I could kill him this very day—this very hour—if I liked, for I know where he is at this very moment. He is in a hole, close to the Ochterlony monument there, in that corner of the yard. But why should I hurt him? He has never offered to do me any harm, and when I sing, as I sometimes do when I am alone here at work on some tomb or other, he will crawl up, and listen for two or three hours together. One morning, while he was listening, he came in for a good meal which lasted him some days.’

‘How was that?’

‘I will tell you, sir. A minar was chased by a small hawk, and in despair came and perched itself on the top of a most lofty tomb at which I was at work. The hawk, with his eyes fixed intently on his prey, did not, I fancy, see the snake lying motionless in the grass; or if he did see him he did not think he was a snake, but something
else—my crowbar, perhaps. After a little while the hawk pounced down, and was just about to give the minar a blow and a grip, when the snake suddenly lifted his head, raised his hood, and hissed. The hawk gave a shriek, fluttered, flapped his wings with all his might, and tried very hard to fly away. But it would not do. Strong as the eye of the hawk was, the eye of the snake was stronger. The hawk for a time seemed suspended in the air; but at last he was obliged to come down, and sit opposite to the old gentleman (the snake) who commenced, with his forked tongue, and keeping his eyes upon him all the while, to slime his victim all over. This occupied him for at least forty minutes, and by the time the process was over the hawk was perfectly motionless. I don’t think he was dead. But he was very soon, however, for the old gentleman put him into a coil or two, and crackled up every bone in the hawk’s body. He then gave him another sliming, made a big mouth, distended his neck till it was as big a round as the thickest part of my arm, and down went the hawk like a shin of beef into a beggarman’s bag.’

‘And what became of the minar?’

‘He was off like a shot, sir, the moment his enemy was in trouble, and no blame to him. What a funny thing nature is altogether, sir! I very often think of that scene when I am at work here.’

‘But this place must be infested with snakes?’

‘I have never seen but that one, sir, and I have been here for a long time. Would you like to see the old gentleman, sir? As the sun is up, and the morning rather warm, perhaps he will come out, if I pretend to be at work and give him a ditty. If he does not, we will look in upon him.’

‘Come along,’ said I.

I accompanied the old man to a tomb, close to the monument beneath which the snake was said to have taken up his abode. I did not go very near to the spot, but stood upon a tomb with a thick stick in my hand, quite prepared to slay the monster if he approached me; for from childhood I have always had an instinctive horror of reptiles of every species, caste and character.

The old man began to hammer away with his mallet and chisel, and to sing a very quaint old song which I had never heard before,
and have never heard since. It was a dialogue or duet between the little finger and the thumb, and began thus. The thumb said:

‘
Dear Rose Mary Green!

When I am king, little finger, you shall be queen.’

The little finger replied:

‘
Who told you so, Thummy, Thummy?

Who told you so?’

The thumb responded:

‘
It was my own heart, little finger, who told me so!

The thumb then drew a very flattering picture of the life they would lead when united in wedlock, and concluded, as nearly as I can remember, thus:

Thumb:

‘
And when you are dead, little finger, as it may hap,

You shall be buried, little finger, under the tap.’

Little Finger:

‘
Why, Thummy, Thummy? Why, Thummy, Thummy? Why,

Thummy, Thummy—Why?’

Thumb:

‘
That you may drink, little finger, when you are dry.’

But this ditty did not bring out the snake. I remarked this to the old man, who replied: ‘He hasn’t made his toilet yet—hasn’t rubbed his scales up, sir; but he’ll be here presently. You will see. Keep your eye on that hole, sir. I am now going to give him a livelier tune, which is a great favourite of his,’ and forthwith he struck up an old song, beginning:

‘
Twas in the merry month of May,

When bees from flower to flower did hum.’

Out came the snake before the song was half over! Before it was concluded he had crawled slowly and (if I dare use such a word) rather majestically, to within a few paces of the spot where the old man was standing.

‘Good morning to you, sir,’ said the old man to the snake. ‘I am happy to see you in your new suit of clothes. I have picked up your old suit, and I have got it in my pocket, and a very nice pair of slippers my old wife will make out of it. The last pair that she made out of your rejected apparel were given as a present to Colonel Cureton, who, like myself, very much resembled the great General Blücher in personal appearance. Who will get the pair of which I have now the makings, Heaven only knows. Perhaps old Brigadier White, who has also a Blücher cut about him. What song would you like next? Kathleen Mavourneen? Yes, I know that is a pet song of yours; and you shall have it.’

The old man sung the melody with a tenderness and feeling which quite charmed me as well as the snake, who coiled himself up and remained perfectly still. Little reason as I had to doubt the truth of any of the old man’s statements, I certainly should have been sceptical as to the story of the snake if I had not witnessed the scene I have attempted to describe.

‘Well, sir,’ said the old man, coming up to me, after he had made a salaam to the snake and left him, ‘it is almost breakfast-time, and I will, with your permission, bid you good morning.’

Lafcadio Hearn

Perhaps the man who never wanders away from the place of his birth may pass all his life without knowing ghosts; but the nomad is more than likely to make their acquaintance. I refer to the civilized nomad, whose wanderings are not prompted by hope of gain, nor determined by pleasure, but simply compelled by certain necessities of his being—the man whose inner secret nature is totally at variance with the stable conditions of a society to which he belongs only by accident. However intellectually trained, he must always remain the slave of singular impulses which have no rational source, and which will often amaze him no less by their mastering power than by their continuous savage opposition to his every material interest …. These may, perhaps, be traced back to some ancestral habit—be explained by self-evident hereditary tendencies. Or perhaps they may not. In which event, the victim can only surmise himself the
Imago
of some pre-existent larval aspiration—the full development of desires long dormant in a chain of more limited lives ….

Assuredly the nomadic impulses differ in every member of the class—take infinite variety from individual sensitiveness to environment: the line of least resistance for one being that of greatest resistance for another; no two courses of true nomadism can ever be wholly the same. Diversified of necessity both impulse and direction, even as human nature is diversified. Never since consciousness of time began were two beings born who possessed exactly the same quality of voice, the same precise degree of nervous impressibility, or, in brief, the same combination of those viewless force-storing molecules which shape and poise themselves in sentient substance. Vain, therefore, all striving to
particularize the curious psychology of such existences: at the very utmost it is possible only to describe such impulses and perceptions of nomadism as lie within the very small range of one’s own observation. And whatever in these be strictly personal can have little interest or value except in so far as it holds something in common with the great general experience of restless lives. To such experience may belong, I think, one ultimate result of all those irrational partings, self-wreckings, sudden isolations, abrupt severances from all attachment, which form the history of the nomad … the knowledge that a strange silence is ever deepening and expanding about one’s life, and that in that silence there are ghosts.

… Oh! the first vague charm, the first sunny illusion of some fair city—when vistas of unknown streets all seem leading to the realization of a hope you dare not even whisper; when even the shadows look beautiful, and strange facades appear to smile good omen through lights of gold! And those first winning relations with men, while you are still a stranger, and only the better and the brighter side of their nature is turned to you! … All is yet a delightful, luminous indefiniteness—sensation of streets and of men—like some beautifully tinted photograph slightly out of focus ….

Then the slow solid sharpening of details all about you, thrusting through illusion and dispelling it, growing keener and harder day by day, through long dull seasons, while your feet learn to remember all asperities of pavements, and your eyes all physiognomy of buildings and of persons, failures of masonry, furrowed lines of pain. Thereafter only the aching of monotony intolerable, and the hatred of sameness grown dismal, and dread of the merciless, inevitable, daily and hourly repetition of things; while those impulses of unrest, which are Nature’s urgings through that ancestral experience which lives in each one of us—outcries of sea and peak and sky to man—ever make wider appeal …. Strong friendships may have been formed but there
finally comes a day when even these can give no consolation for the pain of monotony, and you feel that in order to live you must decide, regardless of result, to shake for ever from your feet the familiar dust of that place ….

And, nevertheless, in the hour of departure you feel a pang. As train or steamer bears you away from the city and its myriad associations, the old illusive impression will quiver back about you for a moment—not as if to mock the expectation of the past, but softly, touchingly, as if pleading to you to stay; and such a sadness, such a tenderness may come to you, as one knows after reconciliation with a friend misapprehended and unjustly judged …. But you will never more see those streets—except in dreams.

Through sleep only they will open again before you; steeped in the illusive vagueness of the first long-past day; peopled only by friends outreaching to you. Soundlessly you will tread those shadowy pavements many times, to knock in thought, perhaps, at doors which the dead will open to you …. But with the passing of years all becomes dim—so dim that even asleep you know ’tis only a ghost-city, with streets going to nowhere. And finally whatever is left of it becomes confused and blended with cloudy memories of other cities—one endless bewilderment of filmy architecture in which nothing is distinctly recognizable, though the whole gives the sensation of having been seen before … ever so long ago.

Meantime, in the course of wanderings more or less aimless, there has slowly grown upon you a suspicion of being haunted—so frequently does a certain hazy presence intrude itself upon the visual memory. This, however, appears to gain rather than to lose in definiteness: with each return its visibility seems to increase …. And the suspicion that you may be haunted gradually develops into a certainty.

You are haunted whether your way lie through the brown gloom of London winter or the azure splendour of an equatorial day; whether your steps be tracked in snows, or in the burning black
sand of a tropic beach, whether you rest beneath the swart shade of Northern pines, or under spidery umbrages of palm: you are haunted ever and everywhere by a certain gentle presence. There is nothing fearsome in this haunting … the gentlest face … the kindliest voice—oddly familiar and distinct, though feeble as the hum of a bee ….

But it tantalizes—this haunting—like those sudden surprises of sensation
within
us, though seemingly not
of
us, which some dreamers have sought to interpret as inherited remembrances, recollections of pre-existence …. Vainly you ask yourself: ‘Whose voice?—whose face?’ It is neither young nor old, the Face: it has a vapoury indefinableness that leaves it a riddle; its diaphaneity reveals no particular tint; perhaps you may not even be quite sure whether it has a beard. But its expression is always gracious, passionless, smiling—like the smiling of unknown friends in dreams, with infinite indulgence for any folly, even a dream-folly …. Except in that you cannot permanently banish it, the presence offers no positive resistance to your will: it accepts each caprice with obedience; it meets your every whim with angelic patience. It is never critical, never makes plaint even by a look, never proves irksome: yet you cannot ignore it, because of a certain queer power it possesses to make something stir and quiver in your heart—like an old vague sweet regret—something buried alive which will not die …. And so often does this happen that desire to solve the riddle becomes a pain, that you finally find yourself making supplication to the Presence, addressing to it questions which it will never answer directly, but only by a smile or by words having no relation to the asking—words enigmatic, which make mysterious agitation in old forsaken fields of memory … even as a wind betimes, over wide wastes of marsh, sets all the grasses whispering about nothing. But you will question on, untiringly, through the nights and days of years:

‘Who are you?—what are you?—what is this weird relation that you bear to me? All you say to me I feel that I have heard before—but where?—but when? By what name am I to call you, since you will answer to none that I remember? Surely you do not live: yet I know the sleeping places of all my dead—and yours I do
not know! Neither are you any dream—for dreams distort and change; and you, you are ever the same. Nor are you any hallucination; for all my senses are still vivid and strong …. This only I know beyond doubt—that you are of the Past: you belong to memory—but to the memory of what dead suns? …’

Then, some day or night, unexpectedly, there comes to you at last, with a soft swift tingling shock as of fingers invisible, the knowledge that the Face is not the memory of any one face, but a multiple image formed of the traits of many dear faces—super-imposed by remembrance, and interblended by affection into one ghostly personality—infinitely sympathetic, phantasmally beautiful: a Composite of recollections! And the Voice is the echo of no one voice, but the echoing of many voices, molten into a single utterance—a single impossible tone—thin through remoteness of time, but inexpressibly caressing.

Thou most gentle Composite! Thou nameless and exquisite Unreality, thrilled into semblance of being from out the sum of all lost sympathies! Thou Ghost of all dear vanished things … with thy vain appeal of eyes that looked for my coming, and vague faint pleading of voices against oblivion, and thin electric touch of buried hands, … must thou pass away for ever with my passing, even as the Shadow that I cast, O thou Shadowing of Souls? …

I am not sure …. For there comes to me this dream, that if aught in human life hold power to pass—like a swerved sunray through interstellar spaces—into the infinite mystery … to send one sweet strong vibration through immemorial Time … might not some luminous future be people with such as thou? … And in so far as that which makes for us the subtlest charm of being can lend one choral note to the Symphony of the Unknowable Purpose—in so much might there not endure also to greet thee, another Composite One—embodying, indeed, the comeliness of many lives, yet keeping likewise some visible memory of all that may have been gracious in this thy friend …?