The Red Book Magazine/Volume 39/Number 6/The Little Ghost

by Hugh Walpole

The
Little Ghost

By
Hugh Walpole

GHOSTS? I have something to say about them that will interest you, I think.....

I lost suddenly my greatest friend. That may mean little or much as friendship is commonly held, but I believe that most Britishers, most Americans, most Scandinavians, know before they die at least one friendship that changes their whole life experience by its depth and color. Very few Frenchmen, Italians or Spaniards, very few southern people at all, understand these things.

The curious part of it, in my particular case, was that I had known this friend only four or five years before his death, that I had made many friendships both before and since that have endured over much longer periods, and yet this particular friendship had a quality of intensity and happiness that I have never found elsewhere.

Another curious thing was that I met Bond only a few months before my marriage, when I was deeply in love with my fiancée and so intensely preoccupied with my engagement that I could think of nothing else. I met Bond quite casually at some one's house. He was a large-boned, broad-shouldered, slow-smiling man with close-cropped hair turning slightly gray, and our meeting was casual; the ripening of our friendship was casual; indeed, the whole affair may be said to have been casual to the very last. It was, in fact, my wife who said to me one day when we had been married about a year or so:

“Why, I believe you care more for Charley Bond than for anyone else in the world.”

She said it in a sudden, disconcerting, perceptive way that some women have. I was entirely astonished. Of course I laughed at the idea. I saw Bond frequently. He was also a journalist and we generally lunched together. He came often to the house. My wife, wiser than many wives, encouraged all my friendships, and she herself liked Charley immensely. I don't suppose that anyone disliked him. Some men were jealous of him; some men, the merest acquaintances, called him conceited; women were sometimes irritated by him because so clearly he could get on very easily without them; but he had, I think, no real enemy. How could he have had? His good nature, his freedom from all jealousy, his naturalness, his sense of fun, the absence of all pettiness, his common sense, his manliness and at the same time his broad-minded intelligence—all these things made him a most charming personality. I don't know that he shone very much in ordinary society. He was very quiet, and his wit and humor came out best with his intimates. I was the showy one, and he always played up to me; and [I think I patronized him a little and thought deep down in my subconscious self that it was lucky for him to have such a brilliant friend; but he never gave a sign of resentment. I believe now that he knew me, with all my faults and vanities and absurdities, far better than anyone else, even my wife, did; and that is one of the reasons, to the day of my death, why I shall always miss him so desperately.

[illustration: I had scarcely sat down in my chair when I was aware that my little friend had come I was conscious of having suddenly something to protect and comfort.]

However, it was not until his death that I realized how close we had been. One November day he came back to his flat, wet and chilled, didn't change his clothes, caught a cold which developed into pneumonia, and after three days was dead. It happened that that week I was in Paris, and I returned to be told on my doorstep by my wife of what had occurred. At first I refused to believe it. When I had seen him a week before, he had been in splendid health; with his tanned, rather rough and clumsy face, his clear eyes, no fat about him anywhere, he had looked as though he would live to a thousand, and then when I realized that it was indeed true, I did not during the first week or two grasp my loss. I missed him, of course, was vaguely unhappy and discontented, railed against life, wondering why it was always the best people who were taken and the others left, but I was not actually aware that for the rest of my days things would be different, and that that day of my return from Paris was a crisis in my human experience.

Suddenly one morning, walking down Fleet Street, I had a flashing, almost blinding need of Bond that was like a revelation. From that moment I knew no peace. Everyone seemed to me dull, profitless and empty. Even my wife was a long way away from me, and my children, whom I dearly loved, counted nothing to me at all. I didn't, after that, know what was the matter with me. I lost my appetite; I couldn't sleep; I was grumpy and nervous. I didn't myself connect it with Bond at all. I thought that I was overworked, and when my wife suggested a holiday, I agreed, got a fortnight's leave from my newspaper, and went down to Glebeshire.

Early December is not a bad time for Glebeshire. It is just then the best spot in the British Isles. I knew a little village beyond St. Mary's Moor, that I had not seen for ten years but always remembered with romantic gratitude, and I felt that that was the place for me now. I changed trains at Polchester and found myself at last in a little cart driving toward the sea. The air, the wide moor, the smell of the sea, delighted me; and when I reached my little village, with its sandy cove and the boats drawn up in two rows in front of a high rocky cave, and when I ate my eggs and bacon in the little parlor of the inn overlooking the sea, I felt much happier than for many weeks past.

But my happiness didn't last long. Night after night I couldn't sleep. I began to feel acute loneliness, and knew at last in full truth that it was my friend whom I was missing, and that it was not solitude I needed, but his company. Easy enough to talk about having his company, but I only truly knew, down here in this little village on the edge of the green cliff, looking over into limitless sea, that I was indeed never to have his company again. There followed after that a wild, impatient regret that I had not made more of my time with him. I saw myself, in a sudden vision, as I had really been with him, patronizing, indulgent, a little contemptuous of his good-natured ideas. Had I only a week with him now, how eagerly I would show him that I was the fool and not he, that I was the lucky one every time!

One connects with one's own grief the place where one feels it: and before many days had passed, I had grown to loathe the little village—to dread, beyond any words, the long, soughing groan of the sea as it drew back down the slanting beach, the melancholy cries of the seagulls, the chattering women under my little window. I couldn't stand it. I ought to go back to London, and yet from that too I shrank. Memories of Bond lingered there as they did in no other place, and it was hardly fair to my wife and family to give them the company of the dreary, discontented man that I just then was.

JUST in the way that such things always happen, I found on my breakfast table one fine morning, a forwarded letter. It was from a certain Mrs. Baldwin, and to my surprise, I saw that it came from Glebeshire, but from the top of the county and not its southern end.

John Baldwin was a stock exchange friend of my brother's, a rough diamond, but kindly and generous, and now I believed very well off. Mrs. Baldwin I had always liked, and I think she always liked me. We had not met for some little time and I had no idea what had happened to them. Now in her letter she told me that they had taken an old eighteenth-century house on the south coast of Glebeshire, not very far from Drymouth, that they were enjoying it very much indeed, that Jack was fitter than he'd been for years, and that they would be delighted, were I ever in that part of the country, to have me as their guest.

This suddenly seemed to me the very thing. The Baldwins had never known Charley Bond, and they would have, therefore, for me no association with his memory. They were jolly, noisy people, with a jolly, noisy family; and Jack Baldwin's personality was so robust that it would surely shake me out of my gloomy mood. I sent a telegram at once to Mrs. Baldwin, asking her whether she could have me for a week; and before the day was over I received the warmest of invitations.

Next day I left my little fishing village and experienced one of those strange, crooked, in-and-out little journeys that you must undergo if you are to find your way from one obscure Glebeshire village to another.

About midday, a lovely cold, blue December day, I discovered myself in Polchester with an hour to wait for my next train. I went down into the town, climbed the high street to the magnificent cathedral, stood beneath the famous Arden Gate, looked at the still more famous tomb of the Black Bishop; and it was there, as the sunlight slanting through the great east window danced and sparkled about the wonderful blue stone of which that tomb is made, that I had a sudden sense of having been through all this before, of having stood just there in some earlier time, weighed down by some earlier grief, and that nothing that I was experiencing was unexpected. I had a curious sense, too, of comfort and condolence; that horrible gray loneliness that I had felt in the fishing village suddenly fell from me, and for the first time since Bond's death, I was happy. I walked away from the cathedral, down the busy street, and through the dear old marketplace, expecting I know not what. All I knew was that I intended to go to the Baldwins', that I would be happy there.

The December afternoon fell quickly, and during the last part of my journey I was traveling in a ridiculous little train, through purple dusk, past fields rising dimly like skeins of silk to a mother-of-pearl sky, and the little train went so slowly and so casually that one was always hearing the murmur of streams beyond one's window, and lakes of gray water suddenly stretched like plates of glass to thick woods, black as ink, against a faint sky. I got out at my little wayside station, shaped like a rabbit-hutch, and found a motor waiting for me. The drive was not long, and suddenly I was outside the old eighteenth-century house and Baldwin's stout butler was conveying me into the hall with a careful, kindly patronage, rather as though I were a box of eggs that might easily be broken.

It was a spacious hall, with a large open fireplace, in front of which they were all having tea. I say “all” advisedly, because the place seemed to be full of people, grown-ups and children but mostly children. There were so many of these last that I was not, to the end of my stay, able to name most of them individually.

Mrs. Baldwin came forward to greet me, introduced me to one or two people, sat me down and gave me my tea, told me that I wasn't looking at all well, and needed feeding up, and explained that Jack was out shooting something but would soon be back.

My entrance had made a brief lull, but immediately everyone recovered, and the noise was terrific. There is a lot to be said for the freedom of the modern child. And there is a lot to be said against it. I soon found that in this party, at any rate the elders were completely disregarded and of no account. Children rushed about the hall, knocked one another down, shouted and screamed, fell over grown-ups as though they were pieces of furniture, and paid no attention at all to the mild, “Now children!” of a plain, elderly lady who was, I supposed, a governess. I fancy that I was tired with my crisscross journey and I soon found a chance to ask Mrs. Baldwin if I could go up to my room. She said: “I expect you find these children noisy. Poor little things, they must have their fun! Jack always says that one can only be young once, and I do so agree with him.”

I wasn't myself feeling very young that evening (I was really about nine hundred years old), so that I agreed with her and eagerly left youth to its own appropriate pleasures. Mrs. Baldwin took me up the fine broad staircase. She was a stout, short woman, dressed in bright colors, with what is known, I believe, as an infectious laugh. Tonight, although I was fond of her and knew very well her good generous heart, she irritated me, and for some reason that I couldn't quite define. Perhaps I felt at once that she was out of place there, and that the house resented her, but in all this account I am puzzled by the question as to whether I imagine now on looking back all sorts of feelings that were not really there at all, but come to me now because I know of what happened afterward.

We went through a number of dark passages, up and down little pieces of staircase that seemed to have no beginning, no end and no reason for their existence, and she left me at last in my bedroom, said that she hoped I would be comfortable and that Jack would come and see me when he came in, and then paused for a moment, looking at me. “You really don't look well,” she said. “You've been overdoing it. You're too conscientious. I always said so. You shall have a real rest here. And the children will see that you're not dull.”

Her last two sentences seemed scarcely to go together. I couldn't tell her about my loss. I realized suddenly, as I had never realized in our older acquaintance, that I should never be able to speak to her about anything that really mattered.

SHE smiled, laughed and left me. I looked at my room and loved it at once. Broad and low-ceilinged, it contained very little furniture—an old four-poster, charming hangings of some old rose-colored damask, an old-gold mirror, an oak cabinet, some high-backed chairs, and then for comfort a large armchair with high elbows, a little quaintly shaped sofa dressed in the same rose-color as the bed, a bright, crackling fire, and a grandfather clock. The walls, faded primrose, had no pictures; but on one of them, opposite my bed, was a gay sampler worked in bright colors of crimson and yellow and framed in oak.

I liked it, I loved it; I drew the armchair in front of the fire nestled down into it, and before I knew, I was fast asleep. And when I awoke, it was with a sense of comfort and well-being which was nothing less than exquisite. I belonged to it, that room, as though I had been in it all my days. I had a curious sense of companionship that was exactly what I had been needing during these last weeks. The house seemed utterly still; no voices of children came to me—no sound anywhere, save the sharp crackle of the fire and the friendly ticking of the old clock.

Suddenly I thought there was some one in the room with me, a rustle of something that might have been the fire and yet was not. I got up and looked about me, half smiling as though I expected to see a familiar face. There was no one there, of course, and yet I had just that consciousness of companionship that one has when some one whom one loves very dearly and knows very intimately is sitting with one in the same room. I even went to the other side of the four-poster and looked around me, pulled for a moment at the silver-colored curtains, and of course saw no one. Then the door suddenly opened and Jack Baldwin came in, and I remember having a curious feeling of irritation as though I had been interrupted. His large breezy knickerbockered figure filled the room. “Hallo!” he said. “Delighted to see you. Bit of luck your being down this way. Have you got everything you want?”

That was a wonderful old house. I am not going to attempt to describe it, although I have stayed there quite recently. Yes, I stayed there on many occasions since that first of which I am now speaking. It has never been quite the same to me since that first time. You may say, if you like, that the Baldwins fought a battle with it and defeated it. It is certainly now more Baldwin than—well, whatever it was before they rented it. They are not the kind of people to be defeated by atmosphere. Their chief duty in this world, I gather, is to make things Baldwin, and very good for the world too; but when I first went down to them, the house was still challenging them. “A wee bit creepy,” Mrs. Baldwin confided to me on the second day of my visit.

“What exactly do you mean by that?” I asked her. “Ghosts?”

“Oh, there are those, of course,” she answered. “There's an underground passage. you know, that runs from here to the sea, and one of the wickedest of the smugglers was killed in it, and his ghost still haunts the cellar. At least, that's what we were told by our first butler here, and then of course we found that it was the butler, not the smuggler, who was haunting the cellar, and since his departure the smuggler hasn't been visible.” She laughed. “All the same, it isn't a comfortable place. I'm going to wake up some of those old rooms. We're going to put in some more windows. And then there are the children,” she added.

YES, there were the children—surely the noisiest in the world! They had reverence for nothing. They were the wildest savages, and especially those from nine to thirteen, the cruelest and most uncivilized age for children. There were two little boys, twins, I should think, who were nothing less than devils, and regarded their elders with cold, watching eyes, said nothing in protest when scolded, but evolved plots afterward that fitted precisely the chastiser. To do my host and hostess justice. all the children were not Baldwins, and I fancy that the Baldwin contingent was the quietest. Nevertheless, from early morning until ten at night the noise was terrific and you were never sure how early in the morning the racket would recommence.

I don't know that I personally minded the noise very greatly. It took me out of myself and gave me something better to think of, but in some obscure and unanalyzed way I felt that the house minded it. One knows how the poets have written about old walls and rafters rejoicing in the happy careless laughter of children. I don't think this house rejoiced at all, and it was queer how consistently I, who am not supposed to be an imaginative person, thought about the house.

But it was not until my third evening that something really happened. I say “happened,” but did anything really happen? You shall judge for yourself.

I WAS sitting in my comfortable armchair in my bedroom, enjoying that delightful half-hour before one dresses for dinner. There was a terrible racket up and down the passages, the children being persuaded, I gather, to go into the schoolroom and have their supper, when suddenly the noise died down and there was nothing but the feathery whisper of the snow—snow had been falling all day against my windowpane. My thoughts suddenly turned to Bond, directed to him as actually and precipitately as though he had suddenly sprung before me. I didn't want to think of him. I had been fighting his memory these last days, because I had thought that the wisest thing to do, but now he was too much for me. I suddenly luxuriated in my memories of him, turning over and over all sorts of times that we had had together, seeing his smile, watching his mouth, which turned up at the corners when he was amused, and wondering finally why he should obsess me the way he did, when I had lost so many other friends for whom I had thought I cared much more, who nevertheless never bothered my memory at all.

I sighed, and suddenly it seemed to me that my sigh was very gently repeated behind me. I turned sharply around. The curtains had not been drawn. You know the strange, milky pallor that reflected snow throws over objects, and although three lighted candles shone in the room, moon-white shadows seemed to hang over the bed and across the floor. Of course there was no one there, and yet I stared and stared about me as though I were completely convinced that I was not alone.

And then I looked especially at one part of the room, a distant corner beyond the four-poster, and it seemed to me that some one was there. And yet no one was there. Whether it was that my mind had been distracted or that the beauty of the old snow-lit room enchanted me, I don't know, but my thoughts of my friend were suddenly happy and reassured. I hadn't lost him, I seemed to say to myself. Indeed, at that special moment he seemed to be closer to me than he had been while he was alive.

From that evening a curious thing occurred. I only seemed to be close to my friend when I was in my own room, and I felt more than that when my door was closed and I was sitting in my armchair, I fancied my new companionship was not only with Bond but was something more as well. I would wake in the middle of the night or in the early morning and feel quite sure that I was not alone—so sure that I did not even want to investigate it further but just took the companionship for granted and was happy.

Outside that room, however, I felt increasing discomfort. I hated the way in which the house was treated. A quite unreasonable anger arose within me as I heard the Baldwins discussing the improvements they were going to make, and yet they were so kind to me and so patently unaware of doing anything that would not generally be commended that it was quite impossible for me to show my anger. Nevertheless, Mrs. Baldwin noticed something.

“I am afraid the children are worrying you,” she said one morning, half interrogatively. “In a way it will be a rest when they go back to school, but the Christmas holidays is their time, isn't it? I do like to see them happy. Poor little dears!”

The poor little dears were at that moment being Red Indians all over the hall.

“No, of course, I like children,” I answered her. “The only thing is that they don't—I hope you wont think me foolish—somehow quite fit in with the house.”

“Oh, I think it's so good for old places like this,” said Mrs. Baldwin briskly, “to be waked up a little. I'm sure if the old people who used to live here came back, they'd love to hear all the noise and laughter.”

I wasn't so sure myself, but I wouldn't disturb Mrs. Baldwin's contentment for anything.

THAT evening in my room I was so sure of companionship that I spoke.

“If there's anyone here,” I said aloud, “I'd like them to know that I'm aware of it and am glad of it.”

Then when I caught myself speaking aloud, I was suddenly terrified. Was I really going crazy? Wasn't that the first step toward insanity when you talked to yourself? Nevertheless a moment later I was reassured. There was some one there. That night I woke suddenly, looked at my luminous watch and saw that it was a quarter past three. The room was so dark that I could not even distinguish the posts of my bed, but there was a very faint glow from the dying fire. Opposite my bed there seemed to me to be something white—not white in the accepted sense of a tall, ghostly figure, but sitting up and staring; it seemed to me that the shadow was very small, hardly reaching above the edge of the bed.

“Is there anyone there?” I asked. “Because if there is, do speak to me. I'm not frightened. I know that some one has been here all this last week, and I am glad of it.”

Very faintly then, and so faintly that I can't to this day be sure that I saw anything at all, the figure of a child seemed to me to be visible.

We all know how we have at one time and another fancied that we have seen visions and figures and then have discovered that it was something in the room, the chance hanging of a coat, the reflection of a glass, a trick of moonlight that has fired our imagination. I was quite prepared for that in this case, but it seemed to me then that as I watched, the shadow moved directly in front of the dying fire, and delicate as the leaf of a silver birch, like the trailing rim of some evening cloud, the figure of a child hovered in front of me. Curiously enough, the dress, which seemed to be of some silver tissue, was clearer than anything else. I didn't, in fact, see the face at all, and yet in the morning I could have sworn that I had seen it, that I knew large, black, wide-open eyes, a little mouth very faintly parted in a timid smile, and that beyond anything else, I had realized in the expression of that face fear and bewilderment and a longing for some comfort.

AFTER that night the affair moved very quickly to its little climax. I am not a very imaginative man; nor have I any sympathy with the modern craze for spooks and specters. I have never seen, nor fancied that I had seen, anything of a supernatural kind since that visit; but then I have never known since that time such a desperate need of companionship and comfort; and isn't it perhaps because we don't want things badly enough in this life that we don't get more of them? However that may be, I was sure on this occasion that I had some companionship that was born of a need greater than mine. I suddenly took the most frantic and unreasonable dislike of the children in that house. It was exactly as though I had discovered somewhere in a deserted part of the building some child who had been left behind by mistake by the last occupants and was terrified by the noisy exuberance and ruthless selfishness of the new family.

For a week I had no more definite manifestation of my little friend, but I was as sure of her presence there in my room as I was of my own clothes and the armchair in which I used to sit.

It was time for me to go back to London, but I could not go. I asked everyone I met as to legends and stories connected with the old house, but I never found anything to do with a little child. I looked forward all the day to my hour in my room before dinner, to the time when I felt the companionship closest. I sometimes woke in the night and was conscious of its presence, but as I have said, I never saw anything.

One evening the older children obtained leave to stay up later. It was somebody's birthday. The house seemed to be full of people, and the presence of the children led after dinner to a perfect riot of noise and confusion. We were to play hide-and-seek all over the house. Everybody was to dress up. There was, for that night at least, to be no privacy anywhere. We were all, as Mrs. Baldwin said, to be ten years old again.

I didn't feel the least desire to be ten years old, but I found myself caught into the game and had, in sheer self-defense, to run up and down the passages and hide behind doors. The noise was terrific. It grew and grew in volume. People got hysterical. The smaller children jumped out of bed and ran about the passages. Somebody kept blowing a motor-horn. Somebody else turned on the phonograph. Suddenly I was sick of the whole thing, retreated into my room, lighted one candle and locked the door.

I had scarcely sat down in my chair when I was aware that my little friend had come. She was standing near to the bed, staring at me, terror in her eyes. I have never seen anyone so frightened—her little breasts panting beneath her silver gown, her very fair hair falling about her shoulders, her little hands clenched. Just as I saw her, there were loud knocks on the door, many voices shouting to be admitted, a perfect babel of noise and laughter. The little figure moved; and then—how can I give any idea of it? I was conscious of having suddenly something to protect and comfort. I saw nothing; physically I felt nothing; and yet I was murmuring:

“There, there! Don't mind—they sha'n't come in, I'll see that no one touches you. I understand. I understand.”

HOW long I sat like that I don't know. The noises died away; voices murmured at intervals, and then were silent. The house-slept. All night I think I stayed there, comforting and being comforted.

I fancy now—but how much of it may not be fancy?—that I knew that the child loved the house, had stayed as long as possible, at last was driven away, and that that was her farewell not only to me but to all that she most loved in this world and the next.

I don't know—I could swear to nothing. Of what I am sure is that from that night on, my sense of loss in my friend was removed, and never returned. Did I argue with myself that that child-companionship included also my friend? Again, I don't know. But of one thing I am now sure: that if love is strong enough, physical death cannot destroy it; and however platitudinous that may sound to others, it is platitudinous no longer when you have discovered it by actual experience for yourself.

That moment in that firelit room, when I felt that spiritual heart beating with mine, is and always will be enough for me.

One thing more: next day I left for London, and my wife was delighted to find me so completely recovered—happier, she said, than I had ever been before.

Two days afterward I received a parcel from Mrs. Baldwin. In the note that accompanied it, she said: “I think that you must have left this by mistake behind you. It was found in the small drawer in your dressing-table.”

I opened the parcel and discovered an old blue silk handkerchief, wrapped round a long, thin wooden box. The cover of the box lifted very easily, and I saw inside it an old painted wooden doll dressed in the period, I should think, of Queen Anne. The dress was very complete, even down to the little shoes, little gray mittens on the hands. Inside the silk skirt there was sewn a little tape and on the tape, in very faded letters, “Ann Trelawney, 1710.”