The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
interest. She was as much out of my life as I was out of hers. By day I
wandered with Mrs. Wessington almost content. By night I implored Heaven
to let me return to the world as I used to know it. Above all these
varying moods lay the sensation of dull, numbing wonder that the Seen
and the Unseen should mingle so strangely on this earth to hound one
poor soul to its grave.
* * * * *
_August 27._--Heatherlegh has been indefatigable in his attendance on
me; and only yesterday told me that I ought to send in an application
for sick leave. An application to escape the company of a phantom! A
request that the Government would graciously permit me to get rid of
five ghosts and an airy ‘rickshaw by going to England. Heatherlegh’s
proposition moved me to almost hysterical laughter. I told him that I
should await the end quietly at Simla; and I am sure that the end is not
far off. Believe me that I dread its advent more than any word can say;
and I torture myself nightly with a thousand speculations as to the
manner of my death.
Shall I die in my bed decently and as an English gentleman should die;
or, in one last walk on the Mall, will my soul be wrenched from me to
take its place forever and ever by the side of that ghastly phantasm?
Shall I return to my old lost allegiance in the next world, or shall
I meet Agnes loathing her and bound to her side through all eternity?
Shall we two hover over the scene of our lives till the end of Time?
As the day of my death draws nearer, the intense horror that all living
flesh feels toward escaped spirits from beyond the grave grows more and
more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick among the dead with
scarcely one-half of your life completed. It is a thousand times more
awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what unimaginable
terror. Pity me, at least on the score of my “delusion,” for I know you
will never believe what I have written here. Yet as surely as ever a man
was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.
In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by
man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is
ever now upon me.
MY OWN TRUE GHOST STORY
As I came through the Desert thus it was--
As I came through the Desert.
--_The City of Dreadful Night._
Somewhere in the Other World, where there are books and pictures and
plays and shop windows to look at, and thousands of men who spend their
lives in building up all four, lives a gentleman who writes real stories
about the real insides of people; and his name is Mr. Walter Besant.
But he will insist upon treating his ghosts--he has published half
a workshopful of them--with levity. He makes his ghost-seers talk
familiarly, and, in some cases, flirt outrageously, with the phantoms.
You may treat anything, from a Viceroy to a Vernacular Paper, with
levity; but you must behave reverently toward a ghost, and particularly
an Indian one.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby
corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes.
Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts
of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at
dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to
answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are
turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts
of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well
curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch
women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the
corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack
Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have
frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life
out of both white and black.
Nearly every other Station owns a ghost. There are said to be two
at Simla, not counting the woman who blows the bellows at Syree
dâk-bungalow on the Old Road; Mussoorie has a house haunted of a very
lively Thing; a White Lady is supposed to do night-watchman round a
house in Lahore; Dalhousie says that one of her houses “repeats” on
autumn evenings all the incidents of a horrible horse-and-precipice
accident; Murree has a merry ghost, and, now that she has been swept
by cholera, will have room for a sorrowful one; there are Officers’
Quarters in Mian Mir whose doors open without reason, and whose
furniture is guaranteed to creak, not with the heat of June but with
the weight of Invisibles who come to lounge in the chairs; Peshawur
possesses houses that none will willingly rent; and there is
something--not fever--wrong with a big bungalow in Allahabad. The older
Provinces simply bristle with haunted houses, and march phantom armies
along their main thoroughfares.
Some of the dâk-bungalows on the Grand Trunk Road have handy little
cemeteries in their compound--witnesses to the “changes and chances
of this mortal life” in the days when men drove from Calcutta to the
Northwest. These bungalows are objectionable places to put up in.
They are generally very old, always dirty, while the _khansamah_ is as
ancient as the bungalow. He either chatters senilely, or falls into the
long trances of age. In both moods he is useless. If you get angry with
him, he refers to some Sahib dead and buried these thirty years, and
says that when he was in that Sahib’s service not a _khansamah_ in the
Province could touch him. Then he jabbers and mows and trembles and
fidgets among the dishes, and you repent of your irritation.
In these dâk-bungalows, ghosts are most likely to be found, and when
found, they should be made a note of. Not long ago it was my business to
live in dâk-bungalows. I never inhabited the same house for three
nights running, and grew to be learned in the breed. I lived in
Government-built ones with red brick walls and rail ceilings, an
inventory of the furniture posted in every room, and an excited snake at
the threshold to give welcome. I lived in “converted” ones--old houses
officiating as dâk-bungalows--where nothing was in its proper place
and there wasn’t even a fowl for dinner. I lived in second-hand
palaces where the wind blew through open-work marble tracery just as
uncomfortably as through a broken pane. I lived in dâk-bungalows where
the last entry in the visitors’ book was fifteen months old, and where
they slashed off the curry-kid’s head with a sword. It was my good
luck to meet all sorts of men, from sober traveling missionaries and
deserters flying from British Regiments, to drunken loafers who threw
whisky bottles at all who passed; and my still greater good fortune just
to escape a maternity case. Seeing that a fair proportion of the tragedy
of our lives out here acted itself in dâk-bungalows, I wondered that
I had met no ghosts. A ghost that would voluntarily hang about a
dâk-bungalow would be mad of course; but so many men have died mad in
dâk-bungalows that there must be a fair percentage of lunatic ghosts.
In due time I found my ghost, or ghosts rather, for there were two of
them. Up till that hour I had sympathized with Mr. Besant’s method of
handling them, as shown in “The Strange Case of Mr. Lucraft and Other
Stories.” I am now in the Opposition.
We will call the bungalow Katmal dâk-bungalow. But THAT was the smallest
part of the horror. A man with a sensitive hide has no right to sleep in
dâk-bungalows. He should marry. Katmal dâk-bungalow was old and rotten
and unrepaired. The floor was of worn brick, the walls were filthy, and
the windows were nearly black with grime. It stood on a bypath largely
used by native Sub-Deputy Assistants of all kinds, from Finance to
Forests; but real Sahibs were rare. The _khansamah_, who was nearly bent
double with old age, said so.
When I arrived, there was a fitful, undecided rain on the face of the
land, accompanied by a restless wind, and every gust made a noise
like the rattling of dry bones in the stiff toddy palms outside. The
_khansamah_ completely lost his head on my arrival. He had served a
Sahib once. Did I know that Sahib? He gave me the name of a well-known
man who has been buried for more than a quarter of a century, and showed
me an ancient daguerreotype of that man in his prehistoric youth. I had
seen a steel engraving of him at the head of a double volume of Memoirs
a month before, and I felt ancient beyond telling.
The day shut in and the _khansamah_ went to get me food. He did not go
through the pretense of calling it “_khana_”--man’s victuals. He said
“_ratub_,” and that means, among other things, “grub”--dog’s rations.
There was no insult in his choice of the term. He had forgotten the
other word, I suppose.
While he was cutting up the dead bodies of animals, I settled myself
down, after exploring the dâk-bungalow. There were three rooms, beside
my own, which was a corner kennel, each giving into the other through
dingy white doors fastened with long iron bars. The bungalow was a very
solid one, but the partition walls of the rooms were almost jerry-built
in their flimsiness. Every step or bang of a trunk echoed from my room
down the other three, and every footfall came back tremulously from the
far walls. For this reason I shut the door. There were no lamps--only
candles in long glass shades. An oil wick was set in the bathroom.
For bleak, unadulterated misery that dâk-bungalow was the worst of
the many that I had ever set foot in. There was no fireplace, and
the windows would not open; so a brazier of charcoal would have been
useless. The rain and the wind splashed and gurgled and moaned round the
house, and the toddy palms rattled and roared. Half a dozen jackals
went through the compound singing, and a hyena stood afar off and mocked
them. A hyena would convince a Sadducee of the Resurrection of the
Dead--the worst sort of Dead. Then came the _ratub_--a curious meal,
half native and half English in composition--with the old _khansamah_
babbling behind my chair about dead and gone English people, and
the wind-blown candles playing shadow-bo-peep with the bed and the
mosquito-curtains. It was just the sort of dinner and evening to make
a man think of every single one of his past sins, and of all the others
that he intended to commit if he lived.
Sleep, for several hundred reasons, was not easy. The lamp in the
bath-room threw the most absurd shadows into the room, and the wind was
beginning to talk nonsense.
Just when the reasons were drowsy with blood-sucking I heard the
regular--“Let-us-take-and-heave-him-over” grunt of doolie-bearers in the
compound. First one doolie came in, then a second, and then a third. I
heard the doolies dumped on the ground, and the shutter in front of
my door shook. “That’s some one trying to come in,” I said. But no one
spoke, and I persuaded myself that it was the gusty wind. The shutter
of the room next to mine was attacked, flung back, and the inner door
opened. “That’s some Sub-Deputy Assistant,” I said, “and he has brought
his friends with him. Now they’ll talk and spit and smoke for an hour.”
But there were no voices and no footsteps. No one was putting his
luggage into the next room. The door shut, and I thanked Providence that
I was to be left in peace. But I was curious to know where the doolies
had gone. I got out of bed and looked into the darkness. There was never
a sign of a doolie. Just as I was getting into bed again, I heard,
in the next room, the sound that no man in his senses can possibly
mistake--the whir of a billiard ball down the length of the slates when
the striker is stringing for break. No other sound is like it. A