They return at evening A book of ghost stories
THE THIRD COACH
The only objection I have to the Royal Porwick Golf Club is that the
sixth green is only separated by a narrow lane from the Royal Porwick
Lunatic Asylum--or rather from its exercise enclosure--the saddest
playground I have ever seen. So-called mad people fill me with dread,
and yet a certain shamefaced fascination. “There, but for the grace
of God, goes Martin Trout”; though why that grace stopped short of
these poor lost souls is a curious mystery understood only by reverend
gentlemen.
So whenever I was approaching the sixth green--a hole I played by some
muscular aberration consistently well--I felt a flickering unease,
hoping to Heaven the inmates were locked in their cells; yet if they
were out at their pathetic exercises I could not keep my eyes off them.
There was one considerable compensation, however, in this proximity,
for it was through it that I made the acquaintance of Lanton, one
of the Asylum doctors. I not only took a strong personal liking for
him, but he interested me deeply. He is a distinguished alienist, and
passionately absorbed in the study of insanity, and yet at the same
time he detests his job.
Many a time he has had to cancel a round with me, and nearly always
for the same reason, that he has been assaulted by a patient. “Didn’t
get the hyoscin hydrobromide (or whatever it was) in quite quick
enough,” he will say, as he surveys me quizzingly yet wearily through
a pair of rainbow eyes, “and the Asylum chairs are infernally hard. It
took four of our strongest warders to keep him from creating a vacancy
on the staff.” As time went on the strain began to tell, and he has
lost his resiliency, but he has always remained a charming, and I felt
heroic, person. He has promised to chuck it if he gets a definite
danger signal, for he has the wrong temperament to resist the withering
experiences of his day’s work much longer.
Those patients who are allowed out take their daily walk along a
deserted bye-road which runs parallel to the third hole, and one day
when I was playing with Lanton, that shuffling, damned parade was
passing by just as I hit a quick, short hook into the hedge bordering
the road. As I walked towards it my eye was caught by an individual
walking alone and writing busily in a note-book. He was dressed in a
round clerical hat, a “dog-collar,” a clerical frock-coat, a pair of
riding breeches, and brown boots. As I approached he looked up at me
with an extremely penetrating, cunning, and yet preoccupied expression
on his face--and then he went on with his writing.
When we had finished the round I described him to Lanton, and asked who
he was.
“The Reverend Wellington Scot,” he replied. “And a very curious case.
If you would like to know more, come down to my study this evening.
That’s all about him now.”
When I arrived at the Asylum, Lanton was just about to set out on his
evening round.
He went to a drawer and got out a note-book. “Read this while I’m away.
I’ll be back in about an hour. There are the drinks and Gold-flakes.”
When he had gone I picked up the note-book, and saw that it was filled
with a very delicate script. I began to read.
* * * * *
I remember that the reason for my being in the Pantham district that
day was that I was paying a visit to a widowed lady of means whom I
wished to interest in a Benefit Scheme. (A Benefit Scheme is a scheme
which benefits me.) I was “Mr. Robert Porter” on this occasion. Ten
pounds richer than when I left it, I was approaching Pantham Station
along a small road which topped the railway embankment. I noticed
casually a train approaching--it was too early to be mine--when
suddenly I saw sparks flashing up from it. It rocked violently, left
the rails, and crashed into a bridge. I saw that the third coach was
smashed to matchwood and bodies were hurled from it on to the side of
the embankment. I started to run--not for assistance, as you might
naturally but erroneously imagine, but to get the story through to the
_Evening News_--which might well result in my returning £20 to the good.
Suddenly I stopped in my tracks, for I subconsciously realised there
had been something very peculiar about that accident. What was it? And
then I knew. _I had not heard a sound._ I ran back to the top of the
embankment, and there was merely a placid row of metals shining in the
sun.
Whereupon I sat down on the grass and thought things over. Like most
superior men I am somewhat superstitious. I was, therefore, convinced
that there was some reason why I, alone of all mankind, should have
been vouchsafed this vision. The only supernatural personage for whom
I have any respect is the Devil, for I believe he looks after his own,
which is more than can be said for any of the more reputable deities.
I regarded this singular apparition as a hint from him, and carefully
recalled the hour of its occurrence in my note-book. I enquired
casually at the station, and found there was no train passing Pantham
at that time. The vision then probably referred to the future--to some
new train not yet in Bradshaw. There were many conceivable ways by
which I might benefit by a railway accident. The Editor of _Truth_,
for example, might be in that third coach, or various other personages
whose demise would not be regretted by me. Pursuing this train of
thought I journeyed back to London.
Now I have described myself as a superior man. I had better explain
that. A superior man is one who rises superior to his environment. All
great moralists from Mr. Pecksniff to the Bishop of London would agree
with me there.
Again, a superior man is one who, by grasping some simple principle
concerning humanity and acting ingeniously upon that knowledge, makes
a satisfactory livelihood. “Ninety-five per cent. of human beings are
mugs,” for example, which is the one I have acted upon. The Bishop and
Mr. Pecksniff might shake their heads over this, but I am convinced it
is true.
My father followed a peculiar profession. He conveyed second-rate
racehorses from one part of the globe to another. Sometimes he’d be
conducting a brace of duds to Jamaica or over to Ireland or France. He
received frequent bites and hacks from his charges, but he expected
them and, I believe, was invariably kind to these glorified “screws.”
Consequently he was away a great deal, but, as this traffic was
sporadic, had much spare time, most of which he spent in conveying
pints of stout from a pot to his belly.
My mother was a good-tempered slut, and the only quarrels she ever had
with the Pater concerned their respective shares of that filthy fluid.
Apart from her good temper and her thirst, there is nothing to record
concerning her.
My father, a squat, bow-legged little gnome, had that complete,
unquestioning belief in the mingled credulity and rascality of his
fellow-men which those who are connected professionally with the Sport
of Kings invariably share. “Racing,” he was wont to declare, “consists
of mugs, bloody mugs, crooks, bloody crooks and ’orses.”
“And which are you?” asked my mother.
“I ain’t neither. I just helps the crooks to skin the mugs by movin’
about the ’orses. I’ve seen too much of it. I’ve seen blokes who was
pretty artful at the doings in the ornery way become just too bloody
silly whenever they ’ear the bookie’s chorus.”
He was so convinced of the peculiar opportunities afforded to
bookmakers for plumbing the depths of human simplicity that he
suggested having me apprenticed to their profession, but my mother
threw a pot at his head for suggesting it. “I didn’t bear my boy to be
a bookie,” was her inflexible decision. All the same, these repeated
references to mugs and crooks had the effect of convincing my childish
mind that the world was entirely peopled by these two classes. As an
example of the lasting effect of those lessons learnt in infancy, I
remain of that opinion to this day.
Most of the money for my education went to quenching my parents’
thirst, but I was taught to read and write, and acquired the rest
myself. In my errand boy days the only literature I could afford was
a newspaper, but this was sufficient to enable me to test the truth
of my father’s generalisation. For the most part it seemed to me
triumphantly to support it.
Let me give a few examples. The head of the firm for which I worked
was one of the greatest commercial figures in England, and the papers
frequently contained articles from his (secretary’s) pen dilating
on the blessings of thrift, hard work and early marriage to “Miss
Right”--yes, he actually used that expression. Yet everyone from the
Managing Director to myself knew that he gambled wildly, ill-treated
his wife, and kept a succession of decorative harpies labelled “dancing
girls.”
Then one of our assistants helped herself to the till and was given
three months. She was anæmic, scrawny, middle-aged, yet the papers
described her as a “pretty girl.” I marked that down; obviously for
some obscure reason the populace preferred their minor female criminals
to be “pretty,” and the papers fostered this harmless inanity. I found
eventually that this rule applies to all women under fifty who earn
mentions in the Press.
Again. We resided in a semi-slum near the Marylebone Road, and one
of our neighbours brought to a close an argument with another of our
neighbours with a chopper. The papers described this as a “West-End
Chopper Attack,” yet anything less “West-End,” as I understood
the expression, than Milk Row was hard to imagine. I marked that,
too. Obviously the populace found something more stimulating in a
West-End Chopper Attack than in a Chopper Attack in other areas. This
extraordinary psychological mystery took me some time to solve, but I
learnt to understand it perfectly. And so as I matured and read and
read and read, I realised that there is an absolute and comprehensive
difference between life as it appears in the Press and life as it
really is. I shall not enlarge upon that, for anyone who compares
what he reads in the papers about Sex, Religion, Sport, Business,
the Theatre, the many-coloured globe of human activity, with what
he experiences himself, knows this to be beyond dispute. When I had
proved to my satisfaction that my father was right I thought very
hard. Ninety-five per cent. of human beings must _like_ to be mugs
and mugged, I decided, must prefer soft tales to hard truths, they
must find a solace and a stimulant in being incessantly bamboozled by
the other five per cent., newspaper proprietors, bookies, bishops,
financiers and politicians. Certainly there must be a percentage of
mugs amongst these professional men, but roughly they represent my
father’s “crooks,” in other words, exploiters of the mass credulity of
the ninety-five per cent. This is not a thesis on human behaviour, so
suffice it to say that I eventually definitely decided the inhabitants
of Great Britain were ninety-five per cent. mugs and five per cent.
crooks, and I used to find great amusement and instruction in following
the workings of this truth down the most obscure and unexpected
bye-ways of our comic civilisation. I was then eighteen, a very junior
clerk. Not to act upon a profound conviction is laziness and cowardice,
so I had to make up my mind which I was to be, mug or crook, exploiter
or exploited.
With the necessity for this decision harshly exercising my mind, I went
to the White City one evening to observe the reactions of humanity
to the spectacle of a succession of thin, rather graceful hounds
in pursuit of a metal mechanism, which I discovered about as much
resembled a hare as poor Miss Flint resembled a “pretty girl.”
As a spectacle it had its points. That deep, dark pool circumscribed by