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Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts written by A. T. Quiller Couch

A >> A. T. Quiller Couch >> Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts



OLD FIRES AND PROFITABLE GHOSTS.

A Book of Stories

A. T. QUILLER-COUCH.







PREFACE

The stories in this book are of _revenants_: persons who either in
spirit or in body revisit old scenes, return upon old selves or old
emotions, or relate a message from a world beyond perception. "Which?"
was suggested by a passage in Hawthorne's Note-books, where he proposes
a story or sketch the scene of which is "to be laid within the light of
a street lantern; the time, when the lamp is near going out; and the
catastrophe to be simultaneous with the last flickering gleam."
"The Lady of the Ship" is very nearly historical. "Prisoners of War"
rests on the actual adventures of two St. Ives men, Thomas Williams and
John Short, in the years 1804-1814. "Frozen Margit" and "The Seventh
Man" have--if not their originals--at least their suggestions in fact.

One of the tales, "Once Aboard the Lugger," is itself a _revenant_.
After writing it in the form here presented, I took advice and gave it
another, under the title of "Ia." Yet some whose opinion I value prefer
the original, and to satisfy them (though I think them wrong) it is
reprinted; not with intent to pad out the volume. But my readers are
too generous to need the assurance.

Q.




CONTENTS


I. OCEANUS.

II. THE SEVENTH MAN.

III. THE ROOM OF MIRRORS.

IV. A PAIR OF HANDS.

V. THE LADY OF THE SHIP.

VI. FROZEN MARGIT.

VII. THE SINGULAR ADVENTURE OF A SMALL FREE-TRADER.

VIII. THE MYSTERY OF JOSEPH LAQUEDEM.

IX. PRISONERS OF WAR.

X. A TOWN'S MEMORY.

XI. THE LADY OF THE RED ADMIRALS.

XII. THE PENANCE OF JOHN EMMET.

XIII. ELISHA.

XIV. "ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER".

XV. WHICH?





OCEANUS

I

My Dear Violet,--So you "gather from the tone of two or three recent
letters that my spirit is creeping back to light and warmth again"?
Well, after a fashion you are right. I shall never laugh again as I
used to laugh before Harry's death. The taste has gone out of that
carelessness, and I turn even from the remembrance of it. But I can be
cheerful, with a cheerfulness which has found the centre of gravity.
I am myself again, as people say. After months of agitation in what
seemed to be chaos the lost atom has dropped back to its place in the
scheme of things, and even aspires (poor mite!) to do its infinitesimal
business intelligently. So might a mote in a sunbeam feel itself at one
with God!

But when you assume that my recovery has been a gradual process, you are
wrong. You will think me more than ever deranged; but I assure you that
it has been brought about, not by long strivings, but suddenly--without
preparation of mine--_and by the immediate hand of our dead brother_.

Yes; you shall have the whole tale. The first effect of the news of
Harry's death in October last was simply to stun me. You may remember
how once, years ago when we were children, we rode home together across
the old Racecourse after a long day's skating, our skates swinging at
our saddle-bows; how Harry challenged us to a gallop; and how, midway,
the roan mare slipped down neck over crop on the frozen turf and hurled
me clean against the face of a stone dyke. I had been thrown from
horseback more than once before, but somehow had always found the earth
fairly elastic. So I had griefs before Harry died and took some rebound
of hope from each: but that cast repeated in a worse degree the old
shock--the springless brutal jar--of the stone dyke. With him the sun
went out of my sky.

I understand that this torpor is quite common with men and women
suddenly bereaved. I believe that a whole week passed before my brain
recovered any really vital motion; and then such feeble thought as I
could exert was wholly occupied with the desperate stupidity of the
whole affair. If God were indeed shaping the world to any end, if any
design of His underlay the activities of men, what insensate waste to
quench such a heart and brain as Harry's!--to nip, as it seemed out of
mere blundering wantonness, a bud which had begun to open so generously:
to sacrifice that youth and strength, that comeliness, that enthusiasm,
and all for nothing! Had some campaign claimed him, had he been spent
to gain a citadel or defend a flag, I had understood. But that he
should be killed on a friendly mission; attacked in ignorance by those
East Coast savages while bearing gifts to their king; deserted by the
porters whose comfort (on their own confession) he had studied
throughout the march; left to die, to be tortured, mutilated--and all
for no possible good: these things I could not understand. At the end
he might have escaped; but as he caught hold of his saddle by the band
between the holsters, it parted: it was not leather, but faced paper,
the job of some cheating contractor. I thought of this, too. And Harry
had been through Chitral!

But though a man may hate, he cannot easily despise God for long.
"He is great--but wasteful," said the American. We are the dust on His
great hands, and fly as He claps them carelessly in the pauses of His
work. Yet this theory would not do at all: for the unlucky particles
are not dust, not refuse, but exquisite and exquisitely fashioned,
designed to _live_, and to every small function of life adapted with the
minutest care. There were nights indeed when, walking along the shore
where we had walked together on the night before Harry left England and
looking from the dark waters which divided me from his grave up to the
nightly moon and to the stars around her, I could well believe God
wasteful of little things. Sirius flashing low, Orion's belt with the
great nebula swinging like a pendant of diamonds; the ruby stars,
Betelgueux and Aldebaran--my eyes went up beyond these to Perseus
shepherding the Kids westward along the Milky way. From the right
Andromeda flashed signals to him: and above sat Cassiopeia, her mother,
resting her jewelled wrists on the arms of her throne. Low in the east
Jupiter trailed his satellites in the old moon's path. As they all
moved, silent, looking down on me out of the hollow spaces of the night,
I could believe no splendid waste too costly for their perfection: and
the Artificer who hung them there after millions of years of patient
effort, if more intelligible than a God who produced them suddenly at
will, certainly not less divine. But walking the same shore by daylight
I recognised that the shells, the mosses, the flowers I trampled on,
were, each in its way, as perfect as those great stars: that on these--
and on Harry--as surely as on the stars--God had spent, if not infinite
pains, then at least so superlative a wisdom that to conceive of them as
wastage was to deny the mind which called them forth.

There they were: and that He who had skill to create them could blunder
in using them was simply incredible.

But this led to worse: for having to admit the infallible design, I now
began to admire it as an exquisite scheme of evil, and to accuse God of
employing supreme knowledge and skill to gratify a royal lust of
cruelty. For a month and more this horrible theory justified itself in
all innocent daily sights. Throughout my country walks I "saw blood."
I heard the rabbit run squeaking before the weasel; I watched the
butcher crow working steadily down the hedge. If I turned seaward I
looked beneath the blue and saw the dog-fish gnawing on the whiting.
If I walked in the garden I surprised the thrush dragging worms from the
turf, the cat slinking on the nest, the spider squatting in ambush.
Behind the rosy face of every well-nourished child I saw a lamb gazing
up at the butcher's knife. My dear Violet, that was a hideous time!

And just then by chance a book fell into my hands--Lamartine's _Chute
d'un Ange_. Do you know the Seventh and Tenth Visions of that poem,
which describe the favourite amusements of the Men-gods? Before the
Deluge, beyond the rude tents of the nomad shepherds, there rose city
upon city of palaces built of jasper and porphyry, splendid and utterly
corrupt; inhabited by men who called themselves gods and explored the
subtleties of all sciences to minister to their vicious pleasures.
At ease on soft couches, in hanging gardens set with fountains, these
beings feasted with every refinement of cruelty. Kneeling slaves were
their living tables; while for their food--

Tous les oiseaux de l'air, tous les poissons de l'onde,
Tout ce qui vole ou nage ou rampe dans le monde,
Mourant pour leur plaisir des plus cruels trepas
De sanglantes savours composent leurs repas. . . .

In these lines I believed that I discerned the very God of the universe,
the God whom men worship--

Dans les infames jeux de leur divin loisir
Le supplice de l'homme est leur premier plaisir.
Pour que leur oeil feroce a l'envi s'en repaisse
Des bourreaux devant eux en immolent sans cesse.
Tantot ils font lutter, dans des combats affreux,
L'homme contre la brute et les hommes entre eux,
Aux longs ruisseaux de sang qui coulent de la veine,
Aux palpitations des membres sur l'arene,
Se levant a demi de leurs lits de repos
Des frissons de plaisir fremissent sur leurs peaux.
Le cri de la torture est leur douce harmonie,
Et leur oeil dans son oeil boit sa lente agonie.

I charged the Supreme Power with a cruelty deliberate, ruthless, serene.
Nero the tyrant once commanded a representation in grim earnest of the
Flight of Icarus; and the unhappy boy who took the part, at his first
attempt to fly, fell headlong beside the Emperor's couch and spattered
him with blood and brains. For the Emperor, says Suetonius, _perraro
praesidere, ceterum accubans, parvis primum foraminibus, deinde toto
podio adaperto, spectare consuerat_. So I believed that on the stage of
this world men agonised for the delight of one cruel intelligence which
watched from behind the curtain of a private box.


II

In this unhappy condition of mind, then, I was lying in my library chair
here at Sevenhays, at two o'clock on the morning of January 4th. I had
just finished another reading of the Tenth Vision and had tossed my book
into the lap of an armchair opposite. Fire and lamp were burning
brightly. The night outside was still and soundless, with a touch of
frost.

I lay there, retracing in thought the circumstances of Harry's last
parting from me, and repeating to myself a scrap here and there from the
three letters he wrote on his way--the last of them, full of high
spirits, received a full three weeks after the telegram which announced
his death. There was a passage in this last letter describing a
wonderful ride he had taken alone and by moonlight on the desert; a ride
(he protested) which wanted nothing of perfect happiness but me, his
friend, riding beside him to share his wonder. There was a sentence
which I could not recall precisely, and I left my chair and was crossing
the room towards the drawer in the writing-table where I kept his
letters, when I heard a trampling of hoofs on the gravel outside, and
then my Christian name called--with distinctness, but not at all loudly.

I went to the window, which was unshuttered; drew up the blind and flung
up the sash. The moon, in its third quarter and about an hour short of
its meridian, shone over the deodars upon the white gravel. And there,
before the front door, sat Harry on his sorrel mare Vivandiere, holding
my own Grey Sultan ready bridled and saddled. He was dressed in his old
khaki riding suit, and his face, as he sat askew in his saddle and
looked up towards my window, wore its habitual and happy smile.

Now, call this and what follows a dream, vision, hallucination, what you
will; but understand, please, that from the first moment, so far as I
considered the matter at all, I had never the least illusion that this
was Harry in flesh and blood. I knew quite well all the while that
Harry was dead and his body in his grave. But, soul or phantom--
whatever relation to Harry this might bear--it had come to me, and the
great joy of that was enough for the time. There let us leave the
question. I closed the window, went upstairs to my dressing-room, drew
on my riding-boots and overcoat, found cap, gloves, and riding-crop, and
descended to the porch.

Harry, as I shall call him, was still waiting there on the off side of
Grey Sultan, the farther side from the door. There could be no doubt,
at any rate, that the grey was real horseflesh and blood, though he
seemed unusually quiet after two days in stall. Harry freed him as I
mounted, and we set off together at a walk, which we kept as far as the
gate.

Outside we took the westward road, and our horses broke into a trot.
As yet we had not exchanged a word; but now he asked a question or two
about his people and his friends; kindly, yet most casually, as one
might who returns after a week's holidaying. I answered as well as I
could, with trivial news of their health. His mother had borne the
winter better than usual--to be sure, there had been as yet no cold
weather to speak of; but she and Ethel intended, I believed, to start
for the south of France early in February. He inquired about you.
His comments were such as a man makes on hearing just what he expects to
hear, or knows beforehand. And for some time it seemed to be tacitly
taken for granted between us that I should ask him no questions.

"As for me--" I began, after a while.

He checked the mare's pace a little. "I know," he said, looking
straight ahead between her ears; then, after a pause, "it has been a bad
time for you, You are in a bad way altogether. That is why I came."

"But it was for _you!_" I blurted out. "Harry, if only I had known why
_you_ were taken--and what it was to _you!_"

He turned his face to me with the old confident comforting smile.

"Don't you trouble about _that. That's_ nothing to make a fuss about.
Death?" he went on musing--our horses had fallen to a walk again--
"It looks you in the face a moment: you put out your hands: you touch--
and so it is gone. My dear boy, it isn't for us that you need worry."

"For whom, then?"

"Come," said he, and he shook Vivandiere into a canter.



III

I cannot remember precisely at what point in our ride the country had
ceased to be familiar. But by-and-by we were climbing the lower slopes
of a great down which bore no resemblance to the pastoral country around
Sevenhays. We had left the beaten road for short turf--apparently of a
copper-brown hue, but this may have been the effect of the moonlight.
The ground rose steadily, but with an easy inclination, and we climbed
with the wind at our backs; climbed, as it seemed, for an hour, or maybe
two, at a footpace, keeping silence. The happiness of having Harry
beside me took away all desire for speech.

This at least was my state of mind as we mounted the long lower slopes
of the down. But in time the air, hitherto so exhilarating, began to
oppress my lungs, and the tranquil happiness to give way to a vague
discomfort and apprehension.

"What is this noise of water running?"

I reined up Grey Sultan as I put the question. At the same moment it
occurred to me that this sound of water, distant and continuous, had
been running in my ear for a long while.

Harry, too, came to a halt. With a sweep of the arm that embraced the
dim landscape around and ahead, he quoted softly--

en detithei potamoio mega spenos Okeanoio
antyga par pymaten sakeos pyka poietoio . . . .

and was silent again.

I recalled at once and distinctly the hot summer morning ten years back,
when we had prepared that passage of the Eighteenth Book together in our
study at Clifton; I at the table, Harry lolling in the cane-seated
armchair with the Liddell and Scott open on his knees; outside, the
sunny close and the fresh green of the lime-trees.

Now that I looked more attentively the bare down, on which we climbed
like flies, did indeed resemble a vast round shield, about the rim of
which this unseen water echoed. And the resemblance grew more startling
when, a mile or so farther on our way, as the grey dawn overtook us,
Harry pointed upwards and ahead to a small boss or excrescence now
lifting itself above the long curve of the horizon.

At first I took it for a hummock or tumulus. Then, as the day whitened
about us, I saw it to be a building--a tall, circular barrack not unlike
the Colosseum. A question shaped itself on my lips, but something in
Harry's manner forbade it. His gaze was bent steadily forward, and I
kept my wonder to myself, and also the oppression of spirit which had
now grown to something like physical torture.

When first the great barrack broke into sight we must have been at least
two miles distant. I kept my eyes fastened on it as we approached, and
little by little made out the details of its architecture. From base to
summit--which appeared to be roofless--six courses of many hundred
arches ran around the building, one above the other; and between each
pair a course, as it seemed, of plain worked stone, though I afterwards
found it to be sculptured in low relief. The arches were cut in deep
relief and backed with undressed stone. The lowest course of all,
however, was quite plain, having neither arches nor frieze; but at
intervals corresponding to the eight major points of the compass--so far
as I who saw but one side of it could judge--pairs of gigantic stone
figures supported archways pierced in the wall; or sluices, rather,
since from every archway but one a full stream of water issued and
poured down the sides of the hill. The one dry archway was that which
faced us with open gate, and towards which Harry led the way; for
oppression and terror now weighted my hand as with lead upon Grey
Sultan's rein.

Harry, however, rode forward resolutely, dismounted almost in the very
shadow of the great arch, and waited, smoothing his mare's neck.
But for the invitation in his eyes, which were solemn, yet without a
trace of fear, I had never dared that last hundred yards. For above the
rush of waters I heard now a confused sound within the building--the
thud and clanking of heavy machinery, and at intervals a human groan;
and looking up I saw that the long friezes in bas-relief represented men
and women tortured and torturing with all conceivable variety of method
and circumstance--flayed, racked, burned, torn asunder, loaded with
weights, pinched with hot irons, and so on without end. And it added to
the horror of these sculptures that while the limbs and even the dress
of each figure were carved with elaborate care and nicety of detail, the
faces of all--of those who applied the torture and of those who looked
on, as well as of the sufferers themselves--were left absolutely blank.
On the same plan the two Titans beside the great archway had no faces.
The sculptor had traced the muscles of each belly in a constriction of
anguish, and had suggested this anguish again in moulding the neck, even
in disposing the hair of the head; but the neck supported, and the locks
fell around, a space of smooth stone without a feature.

Harry allowed me no time to feed on these horrors. Signing to me to
dismount and leave Grey Sultan at the entrance, he led me through the
long archway or tunnel. At the end we paused again, he watching, while
I drew difficult breath. . . .

I saw a vast amphitheatre of granite, curving away on either hand and
reaching up, tier on tier, till the tiers melted in the grey sky
overhead. The lowest tier stood twenty feet above my head; yet curved
with so lordly a perspective that on the far side of the arena, as I
looked across, it seemed almost level with the ground; while the human
figures about the great archway yonder were diminished to the size of
ants about a hole. . . For there were human figures busy in the arena,
though not a soul sat in any of the granite tiers above. A million eyes
had been less awful than those empty benches staring down in the cold
dawn; bench after bench repeating the horror of the featureless carvings
by the entrance-gate--repeating it in series without end, and unbroken,
save at one point midway along the semicircle on my right, where the
imperial seat stood out, crowned like a catafalque with plumes of purple
horse-hair, and screened close with heavy purple hangings. I saw these
curtains shake once or twice in the morning wind.

The floor of this amphitheatre I have spoken of as an arena; but as a
matter of fact it was laid with riveted sheets of copper that recalled
the dead men's shelves in the Paris _morgue_. The centre had been
raised some few feet higher than the circumference, or possibly the
whole floor took its shape from the rounded hill of which it was the
apex; and from an open sluice immediately beneath the imperial throne a
flood of water gushed with a force that carried it straight to this
raised centre, over which it ran and rippled, and so drained back into
the scuppers at the circumference. Before reaching the centre it broke
and swirled around a row of what appeared to be tall iron boxes or
cages, set directly in face of the throne. But for these ugly boxes the
whole floor was empty. To and from these the little human figures were
hurrying, and from these too proceeded the thuds and panting and the
frequent groans that I had heard outside.

While I stood and gazed, Harry stepped forward into the arena.
"This also?" I whispered.

He nodded, and led the way over the copper floor, where the water ran
high as our ankles and again was drained off, until little dry spaces
grew like maps upon the surface, and in ten seconds were flooded again.
He led me straight to the cages, and I saw that while the roof and three
sides of these were of sheet iron, the fourth side, which faced the
throne, lay open. And I saw--in the first cage, a man scourged with
rods; in the second, a body twisted on the rack; in the third, a woman
with a starving babe, and a fellow that held food to them and withdrew
it quickly (the torturers wore masks on their faces, and whenever blood
flowed some threw handfuls of sawdust, and blood and sawdust together
were carried off by the running water); in the fourth cage, a man tied,
naked and helpless, whom a masked torturer pelted with discs of gold,
heavy and keen-edged; in the fifth a brasier with irons heating, and a
girl's body crouched in a corner--

"I will see no more!" I cried, and turned towards the great purple
canopy. High over it the sun broke yellow on the climbing tiers of
seats. "Harry! someone is watching behind those curtains! Is it--HE?"

Harry bent his head.

"But this is all that I believed! This is Nero, and ten times worse
than Nero! Why did you bring me here?" I flung out my hand towards the
purple throne, and finding myself close to a fellow who scattered
sawdust with both hands, made a spring to tear his mask away. But Harry
stretched out an arm.

"That will not help you," he said. "The man has no face."

"No face!"

"He once had a face, but it has perished. His was the face of these
sufferers. Look at them."

I looked from cage to cage, and now saw that indeed all these
sufferers--men and women--had but one face: the same wrung brow, the
same wistful eyes, the same lips bitten in anguish. I knew the face.
_We all know it_.

"His own Son! O devil rather than God!" I fell on my knees in the
gushing water and covered my eyes.

"Stand up, listen and look!" said Harry's voice.

"What can I see? He hides behind that curtain."

"And the curtain?"

"It shakes continually."

"_That is with His sobs_. Listen! What of the water?"

"It runs from the throne and about the floor. It washes off the blood."

"That water is His tears. It flows hence down the hill, and washes all
the shores of earth."

Then as I stood silent, conning the eddies at my feet, for the first
time Harry took my hand.

"Learn this," he said. "There is no suffering in the world but
ultimately comes to be endured by God."

Saying this, he drew me from the spot; gently, very gently led me away;
but spoke again as we were about to pass into the shadow of the arch--

"Look once back: for a moment only."

I looked. The curtains of the imperial seat were still drawn close, but
in a flash I saw the tiers beside it, and around, and away up to the
sunlit crown of the amphitheatre, thronged with forms in white raiment.
And all these forms leaned forward and bowed their faces on their arms
and wept.

So we passed out beneath the archway. Grey Sultan stood outside, and as
I mounted him the gate clashed behind. . . .


IV

I turned as it clashed. And the gate was just the lodge-gate of
Sevenhays. And Grey Sultan was trampling the gravel of our own drive.
The morning sun slanted over the laurels on my right, and while I
wondered, the stable clock struck eight.

The rest I leave to you; nor shall try to explain. I only know that,
vision or no vision, my soul from that hour has gained a calm it never
knew before. The sufferings of my fellows still afflict me; but always,
if I stand still and listen, in my own room, or in a crowded street, or
in a waste spot among the moors, I can hear those waters moving round
the world--moving on their "priest-like task "--those lustral divine
tears which are Oceanus.