A Ghost[1]
: VIPerhaps 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 cond
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
light 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 wilder
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 forever 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
least,--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,--superimposed
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 forever 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 peopled 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...?
More
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