Ghost Stories/Volume 2/Number 2/"To the Dead, All Things are Clear"
"To the Dead
All Things
Are Clear"
By James Dufrey,
As told to Leonard Hess
That there is a life beyond this, I would not believe. That this body of flesh and blood and bone, this mechanism which, after a few years under ground, falls into dust and is food for worms and dissolution, is animated by some force, spirit, soul—call it what you will—which continues its existence after the earthly envelope is corrupted—that I would not credit.
Had I not often laid such a stark, dead body on a stone slab, and with a scalpel discovered its secret recesses, stripped its bones and bared its muscles and nerves and fibres—and had I ever, in the most hidden recesses, found the retreat of the something which, some said, had given the cold corpse life?
It was said that that Something had fled with the last breath. Was I to believe such a myth? For the theories I gave out, always I had some reasonable proof. I stated nothing as fact which, in my laboratory, I had not checked.
I have dissected many a poor body. No, not as a medical student—I am a bacteriologist.
I have seen in my test-tubes the deadly germs of typhoid, of tuberculosis, of countless dread maladies that strike men down to disease and death. I have seen these micro-organisms, malignantly wriggling under my lenses. I could have displayed them to those who believed so firmly in a life to come, and I could have said:
“Here—look! This is the beginning and the end. This is all there is to it. See, for instance, these streptococci. The flesh they enter turns in a few days to decay. I know it is so. I am showing you this. What have you, in return, to show me, of those future spheres you speak of?”
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I was incurring a hundred dangers from infection—to what end? To aid the flesh so that it might escape illness and remain a little longer on this earth. Yet there were those who scoffed at my science, telling me that no man can know the truth, that science is a half-truth—if it is worth anything at all—while they gabbed on about their ghosts and apparitions and voices and manifestations, and what not!
On a winter night, one such rabid believer, my excellent friend, Fuller, regaled me with such discourse into the late hours. He cited instances of his “other world" from Flammarion, Lodge, Doyle, and a dozen others. He read to me from their books to convince me that this world is not all—that we live again in the hereafter.
“It isn’t a matter of faith, either,” he said. “It’s an established fact.”
We sat in my study. Outside, a snow storm raged among the hills, and icy blasts rattled the Windows. The fire leaped redly up and down the chimney. I liked Fuller immensely, and so I listened.
I could see he was annoyed by my disbelief. Presently, at about two in the morning, he left me to go to bed, and I sat alone before the fire, not thinking of the unbelievable tales I had heard, but of a delicate experiment I was to perform on the morrow.
I must have drowsed before the warmth of the flames.
Fuller, I am sure, had shut the study door behind him.
Who but the dead can
write a treatise on life
after death? Yethow
can the dead write?
Doctor Dufrey is faced
with an astounding
problem
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"No," she said, "he wrote it after he died."
Yet when I raised my eyes, I saw that door, standing open. I set it down to the wind.
Then I became aware that my thoughts had been of a mingled sort. With musings on my experiment and my work in general, had been mixed reminiscences of my father, whose kindness had made my career possible. I had thought of my mother, too, who had sat in silent dreams so often before this very fireplace.
And then, through that open door, cameshall I call it a light, a refulgencea shape? No, it was my mother, just as in life. She glided toward me, with never a word, gazed at me with her kindly eyesand was gone. And the door shut of itself!
I confess I was shaken. For many moments I sat motionless, staring at the door through which the apparition had vanished. Then I shook off the spell and laughed.
"Certainly," I said aloud, "I was thinking of mother. My imagination played me a queer trick."
After those hours of talk with Fuller . . . certainly! It was easy to understand. I had been dozing too. There was the entire explanation. I went over the analysis again in the morning, to Fuller.
"When you see spirits, Fuller, examine your own thoughtsor your eyesight."
"Dufrey," he said, "you have seen, yet you will not believe."
"Come into my laboratory," I replied with a smile. "I shall show you an ugly little devil under a slide. I hope he hasn't an eternal soul. None of us would care to meet him oftener than necessary."
My disbelief remained unshaken. I was invited to séances and to other such gatherings, but I refused to go.
But in the course of time, I met Emma. She was of "that tribe." Yet I loved her. And she loved me.
Love will do much. When Emma talked of an hereafter, I listened with delight. But it was her voice that delighted methe unutterable music, the exquisite tones, veiled and mystic, that came from her lips. I argued, of course, against her beliefs. Yet at last she made me break my resolutions and I went with her to a séance. Throughout, in the dark. I held Emma's hand. The hocus-pocus going on around me, earned nothing but my derisive smile.
A halo of light floated through the blackness. Something that might have been called a human shape materialized (as they called it) in one corner of the room. Voices, seemingly far away, replied to hysterical questions, and painted beautiful word-pictures of a better world than ours. And, of more importancethe fat medium, at the end of the farce, collected a dollar from each of us.
Hocus-pocus? I'd say it was!
When we were out again in the brisk air, I said, half laughing, half piqued:
"My dear, do you really expect me to put stock in that shameless fraud?"
"Can you explain it away?" she asked, softly.
"I can think out a plausible explanation," I retorted.
She merely smiled.
The following week she lugged me to another meeting.
Raps sounded in the walls. A table tipped and jigged. A planchette wrote, apparently unguided, a message from a supposed departed. Once agaih we surrendered our dollars to the voracious spirits.
“Some show!” I said sarcastically, when we had reached the fresh air.
I am, you see, trying to tell you this in the rather ribald way it struck me at that time. There is no such ribaldry in me now. But of the change that came over me . . . later . . .
It was at a séance that I met a young man, a friend of Emma’s, by the name of Howard Kane. He was tall, thin, anaemic. And he was vehement in his arguments for spiritualism. He must, he said, convince the sceptics.
“Convince!” I laughed. “That should be an easy task!”
I noted that when my jibes were too deep at Kane, Emma seemed hurt. I grew a trifle jealous, perhaps, at her firm friendship with Kane. They seemed, with their common belief in spiritualism, to share a bond which, despite our love, I did not have with Emma.
Kane was a writer of books. What he wrote concerned itself mainly with the "other life”—as he imagined it must be. There were three or four of his volumes on Emma’s book shelves, and she had long tried to persuade me to read them.
Finally I consented to take The Other Sphere with me on the train home one evening. Two chapters succeeded in boring me so that I threw the book into the rack with my hat. I nearly forgot it on getting out at my station. Then I had to confess to Emma that I couldn’t get through Kane’s frightful balderdash.
“Oh, you scientists think you know everything!” she exclaimed.
“But, my dear, I am behind six months with reading solid, scientific treatises! How can I spend time on this vaporing?”
She grew sad.
“I do wish you believed!” she sighed.
“Why—what différence would it make?”
“James, dear, one of us must die first and leave the other alone. Don’t you think a belief that we must meet again would be a great comfort?”
I admitted that it was so. But how could I work myself into such a belief?
“Howard is writing a new book,” she told me. “I’ve read the first half. It is wonderful, dear. It will give you faith.”
“Don’t try to get me to read it,” I protested.
After our marriage, Kane was a frequent guest over week-ends. But we saw little of him, except at meals, because he secluded himself in his room, where he wrote, hour after hour, on his new book. He would call it, he said, The Irrefutable.
“By George!” I laughed, when I was alone with Emma. “He doesn’t lack conceit, does he?”
She looked reproachful.
“You,” she said quietly, “are working in your laboratory for what you believe to be the good of your fellow-men. Howard is working upstairs—for the same end. Each in his own way, James.”
“But,” I smiled, “‘The Irrefutable’! I don’t say that of my science. Yet it’s something we can see and feel.”
“Howard sees and feels the unknown. He is having a hard struggle. The last half of his book is to be a vision of the hereafter. He has torn up three versions, in despair. He can’t grasp what he needs to”
“Isn’t one version of the hereafter as good as another? We can’t check up on it, can we?”
"What he finally writes,” said Emma, in a low, vibrant voice, "will be the truth.”
“You dear, deluded little”
“Fool, dear? Is that what you meant to say?”
I was considerably annoyed, and there followed our first quarrel.
"I can’t stand it—your belief in such stuff!” I cried. "The truth about the hereafter! The irrefutable!”
And that night, when Emma asked Kane to read us what he had written, I did not try to conceal my contempt.
He painted, surely, a beauteous picture of the promised sphere. His prose was lovely, musical, suave, ingratiating. He was a master of language.
“Words!” I cried. “Words, words, words—nothing but words!"
To my astonishment, Kane sprang from his chair.
“You are right,” he muttered. “I know I hâve failed again. I have missed the . . . the something I have not caught the vibrations. You are right. Words, words, words! But I shall yet find words behind which the truth will blaze! I am determined to find them. You . . . you sceptic, and ail such as you—I shall yet convince!”
I retreated to my laboratory, and until dawn I worked with the soothingly tangible.
A dreadful restlessness, at times a veritable ferocity, came over Howard Kane. His appearance grew unkempt, his eyes were fiery, and I, knowing a little about the mental sciences, feared his mind was teetering toward unbalance. I told Emma that Kane was overworking his brain.
"He is striving,” she answered, “for the irrefutable proof with which to end his book.”
“The dream of a madman,” I scoffed.
Kane, at that moment, burst in on us. In his shaking hand fluttered the sheets of his latest effort to capture a vision of a world to come.
“This is nearer,” he cried. "Nearer, but not yet Will you listen?”
As neither of us answered, being too startled by his sudden outburst, he began to read. Again the smooth-flowing prose, without conviction. I interrupted:
"My dear fellow, ail this is futile—childish. Some day, after you’ve been to this place you speak of”
His stare froze me. Another moment, and he was gone. We saw him through a window, hatless in the sharp November air, stride past the gate and down the snow-patched road.
“Emma,” I said. “He can’t stand it. He’s going mad.”
Emma wept. I could not stop her tears.
“I feel that something awful is going to happen!” she moaned.
“To Kane?”
"I don’t know! Where did he go? Oh, I wish, he were back!”
My wishes were not the same, but I did not tell Emma so. I hoped fervently that we had seen the last of Kane and his The Irrefutable. Then, as I remembered that he must return for his belongings and his precious manuscript, I nearly groaned. I was so sure my wife would be better off without another sight of him. Her words,
“I feel that something awful is going to happen!” began to repeat themselves in my brain. I could not shut them away. They gripped me. They made me feel increasingly fearful.
I called myself an idiot, I remembered that I was a hard-headed scientist, yet for the first time in my life, the unknown frightened me. So that, when Kane returned, I really was as relieved as was Emma. He returned in the flesh. I was rather thankful to him for such concreteness. I was not sure how, exactly, I had expected him to return.
“I have found a little cottage,” he explained, “about four miles from here. I've rented it. I imagine I can work ideally there. Oh, you mustn't think I fail to appreciate your hospitality, Dufrey. It's because I-need a change. I'll make a hermit of myself—except if you people run over once in a while—until the words . . . the words, Dufrey . . . come. You understand?”
Well, he installed himself in the cottage. I had passed it often in my rambles over the countryside. There he waited for word from beyond. Every three or four days Emma visited him, taking him some delicacy, and to find how he was getting on. I accompanied her, for I thought that in my presence Kane could not impart to her so strongly the excitement of his search.
Kane was, in fact, in a state of perpetual excitement. He was, I said to myself, quite plainly a madman. The floor of his room was littered with papers torn in frenzy, because the true word from beyond had not yet arrived. He wrote and destroyed until his fingers were numb. He looked at us, sometimes, with a stare that lacked recognition.
And once, in a loud, cracked voice, he shouted:
“I shall get it! I tell you I shall convince you and your sceptics!”
“But my dear Kane,” I replied quietly, as I tried to soothe him, “—why kill yourself for us sceptics? Are we worth it?”
His eyes went vacant, and he did not answer. What he saw, I cannot tell. It must have been something which we could not see.
Emma too, now, I was sure, feared for his sanity.
“Please come home with us now, Howard,” she pleaded. “You need a rest. You'll work better when you get back.”
He shook off her hand.
“No, thanks. I'll keep at it. Do me this favor. Come tomorrow afternoon. I believe my book may be complete then.”
“So soon?” Emma asked.
“It may be. Will you come? I'll want you to see it, at once. And you too, Dufrey. You may be convinced.”
He was in such a deplorable condition, that I promised.
But the next afternoon, when Emma, ready to go, knocked at my laboratory door, I was in the midst of a difficult piece of work that I could not, without losing my cultures, put aside.
“Go alone, dear,” I said. “I'll be busy for hours. Tell Kane I’m sorry. Perhaps if he has finished his book, he'll come back with you and read it to me tonight.”
She was lovely in her dark furs, with her small, pale, oval face and the dark, violet eyes. She kissed me. For a moment or two she held me tight and I felt a shudder run through her.
“What's the matter?” I asked. “What is it, dear?”
“Nothing. I'm all right. Good-bye, Jimmie.”
It was not until the door had closed on her, not, perhaps, until I heard her drive away in her car, that it struck me there had been something strange and sad in her good-bye.
“By George!” I muttered to myself, “they’ve nearly banged up my nerves—those two!”
It all seemed so foolish. With a feeling of irritation I bent over my microscope and soon I had lost all sense of time.
Scarcely aware, at dark I turned on the electric light. The house was silent. The maid had gone to the city for the day. The night looked in at the black windows. The snowy hills were as specters in the distance. I glanced at last at my watch. It was eight o'clock. Emma should have returned long before.
Downstairs, I fidgeted about. I went back to my work, to overcome my feeling of restlessness. I meant, if Emma was not back by nine, to walk to Kane’s place and fetch her.
Then I heard the front door open and close. Instantly a weird sense hit into my heart. I had not heard the car come to a stop, though the old rattletrap always made an insufferable noise. However, I realized I had been deep over the test-tubes and retorts, and I told myself I had not been listening.
I became sure of that when I heard Emma's feet on the stairs, and I laughed at myself when Emma came in through my door. Her face was white in the dark furs. Her small hand held a sheaf of manuscript.
“So, The Irrefutable is really finished!” I said, smiling.
She sat down and held out the pages to me.
“Will you read it, Jimmie?”
An odd compulsion was in her voice.
“Have you read it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Well—did the message come across? Will the sceptics bow to this?”
“Read,” she said, in the same compelling voice.
For an hour I read, while Emma, motionless, | watched my face. There was a quality in her gaze that made me, from time to time, look quickly up at her. I could not define that quality.
“So,” I said inwardly, “this is what the hereafter is like. Grass and meadows and flowers, and ineffable peace and complete understanding. And the soul, when it arrives, for a few moments is dazed, and then the new life begins and——”
I looked at Emma.
“But dear, isn't this very like what Kane has written before? Some details differ, but in the main——”
“Perhaps the details make the difference,” Emma replied.
“I can’t see it. I mean—— You must please permit us—the sceptics—still to doubt. You see——”
“Jimmie,” she said, softly, “there can be no doubt of it. It is authentic—that account there, you have.”
Her tone arrested me. I looked at her. Again that strange-quality in the gaze she returned.
“Hear what happened, Jimmie. When I came to Howard Kane's cottage, Howard was not there. On his desk, under a weight, lay this manuscript. But, as I say, Howard was not there. Then I found a note from him. It read:
To find my Irrefutable I have crossed voluntarily to the other life. You will discover my body at the bottom of the gully, beyond the den. I returned from the dead to complete my book. Tell the sceptics I must indeed have known what write. Now, surely, there is the light of verity behind my words. This note, too, was written after my return——
“Here is the note, Jimmie. And here is the manuscript. I went to the gully and down on the rocks I saw him——" She covered her face with her hands.
“Do you believe now, dear? I do so want you to believe! He went out to meet death so he could tell you and others of that which cannot die.”
Her words shook me like a gust of cold wind. Then, with sudden anger, I cried:
“What a hoax! What a madman's hoax! Don’t you see it, Emma? Don't you see it? His insanity drove him to suicide. Yes! But the shreds of sanity that remained to him were astute enough to make him write this . . . this outrageous lie. He wrote it before he died. Don’t you see that?”
She shook her head sadly.
“No,” she said, “he wrote it after he died.”
“Emma! Emma, dear—”
“He wrote it after he died,” she repeated solemnly.
“How do you know? How do you know he did not write it before he——”
“Because, dear—well, as I stared down at him where he lay on the sharp rocks, I was so horrified . . . something happened. You see, dear, I too am dead.”
After one unearthly moment, I screamed.
“Emma! Emma!”
Then I took a step toward her. No one was there.
I fell to the floor, and it was long after midnight when I regained consciousness. I stumbled out of that tomb-silent house, into the whistling wind, and I roused a neighbor. The rest can be briefly told.
By the light of lanterns, we found them, both of them, on the rocks at the bottom of the gully.
I was very ill, thereafter, for months. In the blackest hours I understood the bond that had existed between those two. I wanted to go to Emma, to tell her that now such a tie bound her to me also?
Yet then, I thought, I have my work here to do. The body suffers here, before the spirit is released to the hereafter.
Emma comes to me often while I work, and I am the better for her presence. I know she is waiting for me, and that she knows my feelings.
“To the dead all things are clear.”