III—THE SPIRIT TRIES TO MAKE REPARATION
Three weeks later he turned up once more. "Great Heavens!" I cried; "you back again?"
"Yes," he answered; "and I've come to tell you I'm mighty sorry about those ruined MSS. of yours. It is too bad that your whole day's work had to go for nothing."
"I think so myself," I retorted, coldly. "It's rather late in the day for you to be sorry, though. If you'll show your sincerity by going away and never crossing my path again, I may believe in you."
"Ah!" he said, "I've shown it in another way. Indeed I have. You know I have some conscience, though, to tell the truth, I haven't made much use of it. This time, however, as I considered the situation, a little voice rose up within me and said: 'It's all right, old chap, to be rough on this person; make him mad and shove him every which way; but don't destroy his work. His work is what he lives by—'"
"Yes," I interrupted, "and after what I told you on the steamer about what I would do to you when we got on even terms, you are not anxious to have me die. I know just how you feel. No thing likes to contemplate that paralysis that will surely fall upon you when my ghost begins to get in its fine work. I'm putting it in training now."
"You poor droll mortal!" laughed the cockney. "You poor droll mortal! As if I could ever be afraid of that! What is the matter with my going into training myself? Two can train, you know—even three. You almost make me feel sorry I tried to remedy the loss of those MSS."
Somehow or other a sense of some new misfortune came upon me.
"What?" I said, nervously.
"I say I'm almost sorry I tried to remedy the loss of those manuscripts. Composition, particularly poetry, is devilish hard for me—I admit it—and when I think of how I toiled over my substitutes for your ruined stuff, and see how very ungrateful you are, I grudge the effort."
"I don't understand you," I said, anxiously. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that I have written and sent out to the editors of the papers you write for a half a dozen poems and short stories."
"What has all that got to do with me?" I demanded.
"A great deal," he said. "You'll get the pay. I signed your name to 'em."
"Y—you—you—you—did what?" I cried.
"Signed your name to 'em. There was a sonnet to 'A Coal Grab'—that was the longest of the lot. I think it will cover at least six magazine pages—"
"But," I cried, "a sonnet never contains more than fourteen lines— you—fool!"
"Oh yes, it does," he replied, calmly. "This one of yours had over four hundred. And then I wrote a three-page quatrain on 'Immortality,' which, if I do say it, is the funniest thing I ever read. I sent that to the Weekly Methodist."
"Good Lord, good Lord, good Lord!" I moaned. "A three-page quatrain!"
"Yes," he observed, calmly lighting one of his accursed cigars. "And you'll get all the credit."
A ray of hope entered my soul, and it enabled me to laugh hysterically. "They'll know it isn't mine," said I. "They know my handwriting at the office of the Weekly Methodist."
"No doubt," said he, dashing all my hopes to the ground. "But—ah— to remedy that drawback I took pains to find out what type-writer you used, and I had my quatrain copied on one of the same make."
"But the letter—the note with the manuscript?" I put in.
"Oh, I got over that very easily," he said. "I had that written also on the machine, on thin paper, and traced your signature at the bottom. It will be all right, my dear fellow. They'll never suspect."
And then, looking at the spirit-watch which he carried in his spectral fob-pocket, he vanished, leaving me immersed in the deepest misery of my life. Not content with ruining me socially, and as a lecturer; not satisfied with destroying me mentally on the seas, he had now attacked me on my most vulnerable point, my literary aspirations. I could not rest until I had read his "three-page quatrain" on "Immortality." Vulgar as I knew him to be, I felt confident that over my name something had gone out which even in my least self-respecting moods I could not tolerate. The only comfort that came to me was that his verses and his type-writing and his tracings of my autograph would be as spectral to others as to the eye not attuned to the seeing of ghosts. I was soon to be undeceived, however, for the next morning's mail brought to my home a dozen packages from my best "consumers," containing the maudlin frivolings of this—this—this—well, there is no polite word to describe him in any known tongue. I shall have to study the Aryan language—or Kipling—to find an epithet strong enough to apply to this especial case. Every point, every single detail, about these packages was convincing evidence of their contents having been of my own production. The return envelopes were marked at the upper corner with my name and address. The handwriting upon them was manifestly mine, although I never in my life penned those particular superscriptions. Within these envelopes were, I might say, pounds of MSS., apparently from my own typewriting machine, and signed in an autograph which would have deceived even myself.
And the stuff!
Stuff is not the word—in fact, there is no word in any language, however primitive and impolite, that will describe accurately the substance of those pages. And with each came a letter from the editor of the periodical to which the tale or poem had been sent advising me to stop work for a while, and one suggested the Keeley cure!
Immediately I sat down and wrote to the various editors to whom these productions had been submitted, explaining all—and every one of them came back to me unopened, with the average statement that until I had rested a year they really hadn't the time to read what I wrote; and my best friend among them, the editor of the Weekly Methodist, took the trouble to telegraph to my brother the recommendation that I should be looked after. And out of the mistaken kindness of his heart, he printed a personal in his next issue to the effect that his "valued contributor, Mr. Me, the public would regret to hear, was confined to his house by a sudden and severe attack of nervous prostration," following it up with an estimate of my career, which bore every mark of having been saved up to that time for use as an obituary.
And as I read the latter—the obituary—over, with tears in my eyes, what should I hear but the words, spoken at my back, clearly, but in unmistakable cockney accents,
"Shove the fifth!" followed by uproarious laughter. I grabbed up the ink-bottle and threw it with all my strength back of me, and succeeded only in destroying the wall-paper.
IV—THE FAILURE
The destruction of the wall-paper, not to mention the wiping out in a moment of my means of livelihood, made of the fifth shove an intolerable nuisance. Controlling myself with difficulty, I put on my hat and rushed to the telegraph office, whence I despatched a message, marked "Rush," to Peters.
"For Heaven's sake, complete your exorcism and bring it here at once," I wired him. "Answer collect."
Peters by no means soothed my agitation by his immediate and extremely flippant response.
"I don't know why you wish me to answer collect, but I suppose you do. So I answer as you request: Collect. What is it you are going to collect? Your scattered faculties?" he telegraphed. It was a mean sort of a telegram to send to a man in my unhappy state, and if he hadn't prepaid it I should never have forgiven him. I was mad enough when I received it, and a hot retort was about to go back, when the bothersome spook turned up and drew my mind off to other things.
"Well, what do you think of me?" he said, ensconcing himself calmly on my divan. "Pretty successful shover myself, eh?" Then he turned his eye to the inkspots on the wall. "Novel design in decoration, that. You ought to get employment in some wall-paper house. Given an accurate aim and plenty of ink, you can't be beaten for vigorous spatter-work."
I pretended to ignore his presence, and there was a short pause, after which he began again:
"Sulky, eh? Oh, well, I don't blame you. There's nothing in this world that can so harrow up one's soul as impotent wrath. I've heard of people bursting with it. I've had experiences in the art of irritation before this case. There was a fellow once hired my cab for an hour. Drove him all about London, and then he stopped in at a chop-house, leaving me outside. I waited and waited and waited, but he never came back. Left by the back door, you know. Clever trick, and for a while the laugh was on me; but when I got to the point where I could haunt him, I did it to the Regent's taste. I found him three years after my demise, and through the balance of his life pursued him everywhere with a phantom cab. If he went to church, I'd drive my spectre rig right down the middle aisle after him. If he called on a girl, there was the cab drawn up alongside of him in the parlor all the time, the horse stamping his foot and whinnying like all possessed. Of course no one else saw me or the horse or the cab, but he did—and, Lord! how mad he was, and how hopeless! Finally, in a sudden surge of wrath at his impotence, he burst, just like a soap-bubble. It was most amusing. Even the horse laughed."
"Thanks for the story," said I, wishing to anger him by my nonchalance. "I'll write it up."
"Do," he said. "It will make a clever sixth shove for me. People say your fancies are too wild and extravagant even now. A story like that will finish you at once."
"Again, thanks," said I, very calmly. "This time for the hint. Acting on your advice, I won't write it up."
"Don't," he retorted. "And be forever haunted with the idea. Either way, it suits me."
And he vanished once more.
The next morning Peters arrived at my house.
"I've come," he said, as he entered my den. "The scheme is perfected at last, and possibly you can use it. You need help of some kind. I can see that, just by reading your telegram. You're nervous as a cat. How do you heat your house?"
"What's that got to do with it?" I demanded, irritably. "You can't evaporate the little cuss."
"Don't want to," Peters replied. "That's been tried before, and it doesn't work. My scheme is a better one than that. Did you ever notice, while smoking in a house that is heated by a hot-air furnace, how, when a cloud of smoke gets caught in the current of air from the register, it is mauled and twisted until it gets free, or else is torn entirely apart?"
"Yes, I have," said I. "What of it?"
"Well, what's the matter with being genial with your old cockney until he gets in the habit of coming here every night, and bide your time until, without his knowing it, you can turn a blast from the furnace on him that will simply rend him to pieces?"
"By Jove!" I cried, delightedly. "You are a genius, old chap."
I rose and shook his hand until he remonstrated.
"Save your energy for him," said he. "You'll need it. It won't be a pleasant spectacle to witness when, in his struggles to get away, he is gradually dismembered. It will be something like the drawing and quartering punishment of olden times."
I shuddered as I thought of it, and for a moment was disposed to reject the plan, but my weakness left me as I thought of the ruin that stared me in the face.
"Oh, I don't know," I said, shaking my head. "It will have its pleasurable side, however fearsome it may prove as a sight. This house is just fitted for the operation, particularly on warm days. I have seen times when the blasts of hot air from my furnace have blown one of my poems off my table across the room."
"Great Scott!" cried Peters. "What a cyclone of an air-box you must have!"
Fortunately the winter season was on, and we were able to test the capacity of the furnace, with gratifying results. A soap-bubble was blown, and allowed to float downward until the current was reached, and the novel shapes it took, as it was blown about the room in its struggles to escape before it burst, were truly wonderful. I doubted not for an instant, from what I then saw, that the little cad of a spectre that was ruining my life would soon meet his Nemesis. So convinced was I of the ultimate success of the plan that I could hardly wait patiently for his coming. I became morbidly anxious for the horrid spectacle which I should witness as his body was torn apart and gradually annihilated by the relentless output of my furnace flues. To my great annoyance, it was two weeks before he turned up again, and I was beginning to fear that he had in some wise got wind of my intentions, and was turning my disappointment over his absence into the sixth of his series of "shoves." Finally, however, my anxiety was set at rest by his appearance on a night especially adapted to a successful issue of the conspiracy. It was blowing great guns from the west, and the blasts of air, intermittent in their force, that came up through the flues were such that under other circumstances they would have annoyed me tremendously. Almost everything in the line of the current that issued from the register and passed diagonally across the room to my fireplace, and so on up the chimney, was disturbed. The effect upon particles of paper and the fringes on my chairs was almost that of a pneumatic tube on substances placed within it, and on one or two occasions I was seriously apprehensive of the manner in which the flames on the hearth leaped upward into the sooty heights of my chimney flues.
But when, as happened shortly, I suddenly became conscious that my spectre cockney had materialized, all my fears for the safety of my house fled, and I surreptitiously turned off the heat, so that once he got within range of the register I could turn it on again, and his annihilation would be as instantaneous as what my newspaper friends call an electrocution. And that was precisely where I made my mistake, although I must confess that what ensued when I got the nauseating creature within range was most delightful.
"Didn't expect me back, eh?" he said, as he materialized in my library. "Missed me, I suppose, eh?"
"I've missed you like the deuce!" I replied, cordially, holding out my hand as if welcoming him back, whereat he frowned suspiciously. "Now that I'm reconciled to your system, and know that there is no possible escape for me, I don't seem to feel so badly. How have you been, and what have you been doing?"
"Bah!" he retorted. "What's up now? You know mighty well you don't like me any better than you ever did. What funny little game are you trying to work on me now, eh?"
"Really, 'Arry," I replied, "you wrong me—and, by-the-way, excuse me for calling you 'Arry. It is the most appropriate name I can think of at the moment."
"Call me what you blooming please," he answered. "But remember you can't soft-soap me into believing you like me. B-r-r-r-r!" he added, shivering. "It's beastly cold in here. What you been doing—storing ice?"
"Well—there's a fire burning over there in the fireplace," said I, anxious to get him before the open chimney-place; for, by a natural law, that was directly in the line of the current.
He looked at me suspiciously, and then at the fireplace with equal mistrust; then he shrugged his shoulders with a mocking laugh that jarred.
"Humph!" he said. "What's your scheme? Got some patent explosive logs, full of chemicals, to destroy me?"
I laughed. "How suspicious you are!" I said.
"Yes—I always am of suspicious characters," he replied, planting himself immediately in front of the register, desirous no doubt of acting directly contrary to my suggestion.
My opportunity had come more easily than I expected.
"There isn't any heat here," said he.
"It's turned off. I'll turn it on for you," said I, scarcely able to contain myself with excitement—and I did.
Well, as I say, the spectacle was pleasing, but it did not work as I had intended. He was caught in the full current, not in any of the destroying eddyings of the side upon which I had counted to twist his legs off and wring his neck. Like the soap-bubble it is true, he was blown into various odd fantastic shapes, such as crullers resolve themselves into when not properly looked after, but there was no dismembering of his body. He struggled hard to free himself, and such grotesque attitudes as his figure assumed I never saw even in one of Aubrey Beardsley's finest pictures; and once, as his leg and right arm verged on the edge of one of the outside eddies, I hoped to see these members elongated like a piece of elastic until they snapped off; but, with a superhuman struggle, he got them free, with the loss only of one of his fingers, by which time the current had blown him across the room and directly in front of my fender. To keep from going up the chimney, he tried to brace himself against this with his feet, but missing the rail, as helpless as a feather, he floated, toes first, into the fireplace, and thence, kicking, struggling, and swearing profanely, disappeared into the flue.
It was too exciting a moment for me to laugh over my triumph, but shortly there came a nervous reaction which made me hysterical as I thought of his odd appearance; and then following close upon this came the dashing of my hopes.
An infernal misplaced, uncalled-for back gust, a diversion in which, thanks to an improper construction, my chimney frequently indulges, blew the unhappy creature back into the room again, strained, sprained, panting, minus the finger he had lost, and so angry that he quivered all over.
What his first words were I shall not repeat. They fairly seethed out of his turned and twisted soul, hissing like the escape-valve of an ocean steamer, and his eyes, as they fell upon mine, actually burned me.
"This settles it," he hissed, venomously. "I had intended letting you off with one more shove, but now, after your dastardly attempt to rend me apart with your damned hot-air furnace, I shall haunt you to your dying day; I shall haunt you so terribly that years before your final exit from this world you will pray for death. As a shover you have found me equal to everything, but since you prefer twisting, twisting be it. You shall hear from me again!"
He vanished, and, I must confess it, I threw myself upon my couch, weeping hot tears of despair.
Peters's scheme had failed, and I was in a far worse position than ever. Shoving I can stand, but the brief exhibition of twisting that I had had in watching his struggles with that awful cyclonic blast from below convinced me that there was something in life even more to be dreaded than the shoving he and I had been indulging in.
But there was a postscript, and now all is well again, because—but let us reserve the wherefore of the postscript for another, concluding chapter.
V—POSTSCRIPT
So hopeless was my estate now become that, dreading more than ever that which the inscrutable future held for me, I sat down and framed an advertisement, which I contemplated putting in all the newspapers, weeklies, and monthly periodicals, offering a handsome reward for any suggestion which might result in ridding me of the cockney ghost. The inventive mind of man has been able to cope successfully with rats and mice and other household pests. Why, then, should there not be somewhere in the world a person of sufficient ingenuity to cope with an obnoxious spirit? If rat -dynamite and rough on June-bugs were possible, why was it not likely that some as yet unknown person had turned his attention to spectrology, and evolved something in the nature of rough on ghosts, spectremelinite, or something else of an effective nature, I asked myself. It seemed reasonable to suppose that out of the millions of people in the world there were others than Peters and myself who had made a study of ghosts and methods of exorcising them, and if these persons could only be reached I might yet escape. Accordingly, I penned the advertisement about as follows:
WANTED, by a young and rising author, who is pursued by a vindictive spirit,
A GHOST CURE.
A liberal reward will be paid to any wizard, recognized or unrecognized, who will, before February I, 1898, send to me a detailed statement of a
GUARANTEED METHOD
of getting rid of
SPOOKS.
It is agreed that these communications shall be regarded as strictly confidential until such a time as through their medium the spirit is effectually
LAID,
after which time the cure will be exploited
FREE OF CHARGE
in the best advertising mediums of the day.
To this I appended an assumed name and a temporary address, and was about to send it out, when my friend Wilkins, a millionaire student of electricity, living in Florida, invited me to spend my Christmas holidays with him on Lake Worth.
"I've got a grand scheme," he wrote, "which I am going to test, and I'd like to have you present at the trial. Come down, if you can, and see my new electric sailboat and all-around dynamic Lone Fisherman."
The idea took hold of me at once. In my nervous state the change of scene would do me good. Besides, Wilkins was a delightful companion.
So, forgetting my woes for the moment, I packed my trunk and started South for Wilkins's Island. It was upon this trip that the vengeful spirit put in his first twist, for at Jacksonville I was awakened in the middle of the night by a person, whom I took to be the conductor, who told me to change cars. This I did, and falling asleep in the car to which I had changed, waked up the next morning to find myself speeding across the peninsula instead of going downward towards the Keys, as I should have done, landing eventually at a small place called Homosassa, on the Gulf coast.
Of course it was not the conductor of the first train who, under cover of the darkness, had led me astray, but the pursuing spirit, as I found out when, bewildered, I sat upon the platform of the station at Homosassa, wondering how the deuce I had got there. He turned up at that moment, and frankly gloated over the success of what he called shove the seventh, and twist the first.
"Nice place, this," said he, with a nauseating smirk. "So close to Lake Worth—eh? Only two days' ride on the choo-choo, if you make connections, and when changing take the right trains."
I pretended not to see him, and began to whistle the intermezzo from "Cavalleria Rusticana," to show how little I cared.
"Good plan, old chap," said he; "but it won't work. I know you are put out, in spite of the tunefulness of your soul. But wait for my second twist. You'll wish you'd struck a cyclone instead when that turn comes."
It was, as he suggested, at least two days before I was able to get to Wilkins at Lake Worth; but after I got there the sense of annoyance and the deep dejection into which I was plunged wore away, as well it might, for the test which I was invited to witness was most interesting. The dynamic Lone Fisherman was wonderful enough, but the electric sail-boat was a marvel. The former was very simple. It consisted of a reel operated by electricity, which, the moment a blue-fish struck the skid at the end of the line, reeled the fish in, and flopped it into a basket as easily and as surely as you please; but the principle of the sailboat was new.
"I don't need a breeze to sail anywhere," said Wilkins, as he hauled up the mainsail, which flapped idly in the still air. "For you see," he added, touching a button alongside of the tiller, "this button sets that big electric fan in the stern revolving, and the result is an artificial breeze which distends the sail, and there you are."
It was even as he said. A huge fan with a dozen flanges in the stern began to revolve with wonderful rapidity; in an instant the sails bellied out, and the Horace J., as his boat was named, was speeding through the waters before the breeze thus created in record-breaking fashion.
"By Jove, Billie," I said, "this is a dandy!"
"Isn't it!" cried an old familiar voice at my elbow.
I turned as if stung. The spirit was with me again, prepared, I doubted not, for his second twist. I sprang from my seat, a sudden inspiration flashing upon me, jumped back of the revolving fan, and turning the full force of the wind it created upon my vindictive visitant, blew him fairly and squarely into the bulging sail.
"There, blast your cockney eyes!" I cried; "take that."
He tried to retort, but without avail. The wind that emanated from the fan fairly rammed his words back into his throat every time he opened his mouth to speak, and there he lay, flat against the canvas, fluttering like a leaf, powerless to escape.
"Hot air doesn't affect you much, you transparent jackass!" I roared. "Let me see how a stiff nor'easter suits your style of beauty."
I will not bore the reader with any further details of the Lake Worth experience. Suffice it to say that for five hours I kept the miserable thing a pneumatic prisoner in the concave surface of the sail. Try as he would, he could not escape, and finally, when Wilkins and I went ashore for the night, and the cockney ghost was released, he vanished, using unutterable language, and an idea came to me, putting which into operation, I at last secured immunity from his persecutions.
Returning to New York three days later, I leased a small office in a fire-proof power building not far from Madison Square, fitted it up as if for my own use, and had placed in the concealment of a closet at its easterly end the largest electric fan I could get. It was ten feet in diameter, and was provided with sixteen flanges. When it was in motion not a thing could withstand the blast that came from it. Tables, chairs, even a cut-glass inkstand weighing two pounds, were blown with a crash against the solid stone and iron construction back of the plaster of my walls. And then I awaited his coming.
Suffice it to say that he came, sat down calmly and unsuspecting in the chair I had had made for his especial benefit, and then the moment he began to revile me I turned on the power, the fan began to revolve, the devastating wind rushed down upon him with a roar, pinned him to the wall like a butterfly on a cork, and he was at last my prisoner—and he is my prisoner still. For three weeks has that wheel been revolving night and day, and despite all his cunning he cannot creep beyond its blustering influence, nor shall he ever creep therefrom while I have six hundred dollars per annum to pay for the rent and cost of power necessary to keep the fan going. Every once in a while I return and gloat over him; and I can tell by the movement of his lips that he is trying to curse me, but he cannot, for, even as Wilkins's fan blew his words of remonstrance back into his throat, so does my wheel, twice as powerful, keep his torrent of invective from greeting my ear.
I should be happy to prove the truth of all this by showing any curious-minded reader the spectacle which gives me so much joy, but I fear to do so lest the owners of the building, discovering the uses to which their office has been put, shall require me to vacate the premises.
Of course he may ultimately escape, through some failure of the machine to operate, but it is guaranteed to run five years without a break, so for that period at least I am safe, and by that time it may be that he will be satisfied to call things square. I shall be satisfied if he is.
Meanwhile, I devote my successful plan to the uses of all who may be troubled as I was, finding in their assumed gratitude a sufficient compensation for my ingenuity.