“I don’t want to make you fellows nervous,” began my uncle in a peculiarly impressive, not to say blood-curdling, tone of voice, “and if you would rather that I did not mention it, I won’t; but, as a matter of fact, this very house, in which we are now sitting, is haunted.”
“You don’t say that!” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.
“What’s the use of your saying I don’t say it when I have just said it?” retorted my uncle somewhat pettishly. “You do talk so foolishly. I tell you the house is haunted. Regularly on Christmas Eve the Blue Chamber [they called the room next to the nursery the ‘blue chamber,’ at my uncle’s, most of the toilet service being of that shade] is haunted by the ghost of a sinful man – a man who once killed a Christmas wait with a lump of coal.”
“How did he do it?” asked Mr. Coombes, with eager anxiousness. “Was it difficult?”
“I do not know how he did it,” replied my uncle; “he did not explain the process. The wait had taken up a position just inside the front gate, and was singing a ballad. It is presumed that, when he opened his mouth for B flat, the lump of coal was thrown by the sinful man from one of the windows, and that it went down the wait’s throat and choked him.”
“You want to be a good shot, but it is certainly worth trying[18],” murmured Mr. Coombes thoughtfully.
“But that was not his only crime, alas!” added my uncle. “Prior to that he had killed a solo cornet-player.”
“No! Is that really a fact?” exclaimed Mr. Coombes.
“Of course it’s a fact,” answered my uncle testily; “at all events, as much a fact as you can expect to get in a case of this sort.
“How very captious you are this evening. The circumstantial evidence was overwhelming. The poor fellow, the cornet-player, had been in the neighbourhood barely a month. Old Mr. Bishop, who kept the ‘Jolly Sand Boys’ at the time, and from whom I had the story, said he had never known a more hard-working and energetic solo cornet-player. He, the cornet-player, only knew two tunes, but Mr. Bishop said that the man could not have played with more vigour, or for more hours in a day, if he had known forty. The two tunes he did play were “Annie Laurie” and “Home, Sweet Home”; and as regarded his performance of the former melody, Mr. Bishop said that a mere child could have told what it was meant for.
“This musician – this poor, friendless artist used to come regularly and play in this street just opposite for two hours every evening. One evening he was seen, evidently in response to an invitation, going into this very house, BUT WAS NEVER SEEN COMING OUT OF IT[19]!”
“Did the townsfolk try offering any reward for his recovery?” asked Mr. Coombes.
“Not a ha’penny,” replied my uncle.
“Another summer,” continued my uncle, “a German band visited here, intending – so they announced on their arrival – to stay till the autumn.
“On the second day from their arrival, the whole company, as fine and healthy a body of men as one could wish to see, were invited to dinner by this sinful man, and, after spending the whole of the next twenty-four hours in bed, left the town a broken and dyspeptic crew; the parish doctor, who had attended them, giving it as his opinion that it was doubtful if they would, any of them, be fit to play an air again[20].”
“You – you don’t know the recipe, do you?” asked Mr. Coombes.
“Unfortunately I do not,” replied my uncle; “but the chief ingredient was said to have been railway refreshment-room pork-pie.
“I forget the man’s other crimes,” my uncle went on; “I used to know them all at one time, but my memory is not what it was[21]. I do not, however, believe I am doing his memory an injustice in believing that he was not entirely unconnected with the death, and subsequent burial, of a gentleman who used to play the harp with his toes; and that neither was he altogether unresponsible for the lonely grave of an unknown stranger who had once visited the neighbourhood, an Italian peasant lad, a performer upon the barrel-organ.
“Every Christmas Eve,” said my uncle, cleaving with low impressive tones the strange awed silence that, like a shadow, seemed to have slowly stolen into and settled down upon the room, “the ghost of this sinful man haunts the Blue Chamber, in this very house. There, from midnight until cock-crow, amid wild muffled shrieks and groans and mocking laughter and the ghostly sound of horrid blows, it does fierce phantom fight with the spirits of the solo cornet-player and the murdered wait, assisted at intervals, by the shades of the German band; while the ghost of the strangled harpist plays mad ghostly melodies with ghostly toes on the ghost of a broken harp.”
Uncle said the Blue Chamber was comparatively useless as a sleeping-apartment on Christmas Eve.
“Hark!” said uncle, raising a warning hand towards the ceiling, while we held our breath, and listened; “Hark! I believe they are at it now – in the BLUE CHAMBER!”
I rose up, and said that I would sleep in the Blue Chamber.
Before I tell you my own story, however – the story of what happened in the Blue Chamber – I would wish to preface it with —
I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my own. You see it is not a story like the other stories that I have been telling you, or rather that Teddy Biffles, Mr. Coombes, and my uncle have been telling you: it is a true story. It is not a story told by a person sitting round a fire on Christmas Eve, drinking whisky punch: it is a record of events that actually happened.
Indeed, it is not a ‘story’ at all, in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: it is a report. It is, I feel, almost out of place in a book of this kind. It is more suitable to a biography, or an English history.
There is another thing that makes it difficult for me to tell you this story, and that is, that it is all about myself. In telling you this story, I shall have to keep on talking about myself; and talking about ourselves is what we modern-day authors have a strong objection to doing. If we literary men of the new school have one praiseworthy yearning more ever present to our minds than another it is the yearning never to appear in the slightest degree egotistical.
I myself, so I am told, carry this coyness – this shrinking reticence concerning anything connected with my own personality, almost too far; and people grumble at me because of it. People come to me and say:
“Well, now, why don’t you talk about yourself a bit? That’s what we want to read about. Tell us something about yourself.”
But I have always replied, “No.” It is not that I do not think the subject an interesting one. I cannot myself conceive of any topic more likely to prove fascinating to the world as a whole, or at all events to the cultured portion of it. But I will not do it, on principle. It is inartistic, and it sets a bad example to the younger men. Other writers (a few of them) do it, I know; but I will not – not as a rule.
Under ordinary circumstances, therefore, I should not tell you this story at all. I should say to myself, “No! It is a good story, it is a moral story, it is a strange, weird, enthralling sort of a story; and the public, I know, would like to hear it; and I should like to tell it to them; but it is all about myself – about what I said, and what I saw, and what I did, and I cannot do it. My retiring, anti-egotistical nature will not permit me to talk in this way about myself.”
But the circumstances surrounding this story are not ordinary, and there are reasons prompting me, in spite of my modesty, to rather welcome the opportunity of relating it.
As I stated at the beginning, there has been unpleasantness in our family over this party of ours, and, as regards myself in particular[22], and my share in the events I am now about to set forth, gross injustice has been done me.
As a means of replacing my character in its proper light – of dispelling the clouds of calumny and misconception with which it has been darkened, I feel that my best course is to give a simple, dignified narration of the plain facts, and allow the unprejudiced to judge for themselves. My chief object, I candidly confess, is to clear myself from unjust aspersion. Spurred by this motive – and I think it is an honourable and a right motive – I find I am enabled to overcome my usual repugnance to talking about myself, and can thus tell —
As soon as my uncle had finished his story, I, as I have already told you, rose up and said that I would sleep in the Blue Chamber that very night.
“Never![23]” cried my uncle, springing up. “You shall not put yourself in this deadly peril. Besides, the bed is not made.”
“Never mind the bed,” I replied. “I have lived in furnished apartments for gentlemen, and have been accustomed to sleep on beds that have never been made from one year’s end to the other. Do not thwart me in my resolve. I am young, and have had a clear conscience now for over a month. The spirits will not harm me. I may even do them some little good, and induce them to be quiet and go away. Besides, I should like to see the show.”
Saying which, I sat down again. (How Mr. Coombes came to be in my chair, instead of at the other side of the room, where he had been all the evening; and why he never offered to apologise when I sat right down on top of him; and why young Biffles should have tried to palm himself off upon me as my Uncle John, and induced me, under that erroneous impression, to shake him by the hand for nearly three minutes, and tell him that I had always regarded him as father, – are matters that, to this day, I have never been able to fully understand.)
They tried to dissuade me from what they termed my foolhardy enterprise[24], but I remained firm, and claimed my privilege. I was “the guest.” “The guest” always sleeps in the haunted chamber on Christmas Eve; it is his perquisite.
They said that if I put it on that footing, they had, of course, no answer; and they lighted a candle for me, and accompanied me upstairs in a body[25].
Whether elevated by the feeling that I was doing a noble action, or animated by a mere general consciousness of rectitude, is not for me to say, but I went upstairs that night with remarkable buoyancy. It was as much as I could do to stop at the landing when I came to it; I felt I wanted to go on up to the roof. But, with the help of the banisters, I restrained my ambition, wished them all good-night, and went in and shut the door.
Things began to go wrong with me from the very first. The candle tumbled out of the candlestick before my hand was off the lock. It kept on tumbling out of the candlestick, and every time I picked put it up and put it in, it tumbled out again: I never saw such a slippery candle. I gave up attempting to use the candlestick at last, and carried the candle about in my hand; and, even then, it would not keep upright. So I got wild and threw it out of window, and undressed and went to bed in the dark.
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