Murther and Walking Spirits Read online

  I have not yet tested my powers, for I am still a green hand at this business of death, and I have no clear idea of what my powers may be. Can I haunt Going? I have never given any consideration to the matter of haunting before, and what I recollect from ghost stories does not especially appeal to me. To be a crude spectre, appearing in doorways or discovered squatting by the fireside when people enter rooms, is out of the question for such a spirit as I. My intended prey lives in an apartment, and has no fireside; I shall certainly not make a fool of myself squatting by his thermostat. No, no; the conventional ghost business is not for me.

  Of course there have been ghosts in the Henry James manner, ghosts who assert themselves as influences or invasions of the mind; ghosts who are seen only when the observer is in a state where certainty about what is seen is out of the question. I might try that, or perhaps I should say more discreetly that I may hope for that. I do not feel that I can be definite about what I shall do. Oh, for an hour’s talk with Hugh McWearie!

  McWearie would know, or at least he would have some opinion backed up by his learning in such matters. Hugh is an odd duck, a man who had been ordained in his youth as a Presbyterian minister; he had assumed that solemnity to please his parents, but he could not endure it and defected to be a journalist commenting on religious matters, and devoting himself to the study of metaphysics. But even as a metaphysician he was out of step with his contemporaries. He simply would not consent to be of his time; Hugh was a pre-Kant man, and to him the fact that an idea was three hundred or three thousand years old did not in the least invalidate it. In such things, he would say, there is no question of progress forward; the journey is always inward, where time is measured by a different clock. But as the inward journey is necessarily taken alone, how much credence may we give to what is said by those who undertake it? Is it wholly personal, or is some part at least of general validity?

  “My answer to that,” he had once said during one of our collogues in his office, when I put the question to him, “has to be a qualified Yes, conditioned by a prudential No. These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively scepticism about everything.”

  “That doesn’t get you anywhere,” I said.

  “Oh, but it does. It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility. It is a little understood aspect of the Golden Mean. You were speculating about the afterlife. You can believe anything you like, with a good chance that you’re wrong, because nobody knows anything about it.”

  “Yes, but what about these ‘after-death experiences’ that are so much discussed nowadays? People who have been pronounced dead, and who have been brought back to life by electric shock or something of the sort, and who report that they stood outside themselves and saw and heard the doctors working over their supposedly dead bodies? There are too many of those to be dismissed.”

  “Ah, yes – well – but they are never absent from the body for more than a few minutes. Suppose the electric shock doesn’t work, and they don’t return?”

  “Lots of them have said they didn’t want to return. They were well pleased to be wherever they were and dismayed by the idea of returning to all the trivialities and petty burdens of life.”

  “They returned, all the same, or you wouldn’t know what they said. What about those that don’t return? What do you suppose happens to them?”

  “Nobody knows.”

  “Quite a few people have thought they knew. Orientals of all kinds have been eloquent on the subject, and believe me it isn’t any simple Christian Heaven they postulate. One of their great notions is that after death comes a waiting period before rebirth. A lot of them are very great on rebirth.”

  “Reincarnation?”

  “In a sophisticated sense. You scramble up and down on the great ladder of Nature, and when you’ve made it as far as Man you can be Man in wide variety – pig-man, dog-man, monkey-man, as you struggle toward Buddhahood. That’s the great aim, you see, and it carries great privileges. The Lord Buddha, before he came to earth for the last time in human form, took pains to make sure that he was born at the right time, into the right nation, into a suitable family, with a worthy woman to be his mother. He took no chances. Pernickety, for a god, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I thought you were scornful of accepting Eastern religious ideas into Western religious thought?”

  “Cautious, yes: scornful, no. I don’t believe in trying to turn Westerners into Easterners. People who have failed at Christianity aren’t likely to make great Buddhists. You can’t neglect the demands of geography and race in determining what people can seriously believe. But you don’t have to; Swedenborg was quite definite about a waiting-period after death, and he was as Western as they come.”

  “I don’t know anything about Swedenborg.”

  “You and too many others. A great man, but not an easy man. A fine scientist, who then became what people call a mystic, because he talked about what couldn’t be seen or proven, but could be speculated on by a man with the right sort of intelligence. Himself, in fact. If you don’t know anything about Swedenborg, I presume you’ve heard of William Blake? Yes? Well. You don’t have to look insulted; I can’t count on anybody knowing anything in these bad days. And I suppose you’ve read all the poems, and skipped the Prophetic Books.”

  “My professor said they would not be required reading.”

  “Aye, too difficult for tiny minds. Remarkable stuff. Like struggling in porridge, which nourishes you richly as you drown. Well, anyhow, Swedenborg, and I expect Blake, would both have found a lot to make them nod their wigs in the descriptions of the Bardo.”

  “The Bardo?”

  “That’s the Tibetan term. State of being, roughly. It would frighten you out of your wits, some of it. The Encounter With The Eight Wrathful Ones, for instance. Rather like walking naked through a very long car-wash. Darkness, terrifying noise, and all the while you are slapped, spanked, squirted on from above and below and mauled and insulted until at last you emerge into the light, cleansed and humbled and ready for rebirth in whatever form you now merit.”

  “I’ll skip the Bardo,” I said.

  “If you can. Anyhow, I doubt if it would be the same for you as for a Tibetan monk. You’re a Celt, like myself. If there is a waiting-period for us after we peg out, I rather hope it will include some encounters with Arawn, or Brigit, or Arianrhod, or Gwen of the Three Breasts.”

  “All goddesses?”

  “I’d rather take my chances with a goddess than with the Eight Wrathful Ones. What reason have we to suppose that Ultimate Reality isn’t feminine?”

  “We were both brought up with a prejudice in favour of a masculine God.”

  “That’s one of the reasons why I hung up my gown and fled from the pulpit. These male gods – damn them – all lawgivers and judges. All eternally right. No chance there for the Shakespearean cast of thought. No, no, my lad; it is the Eternal Feminine that leads us aloft, as Goethe very finely said at the end of his eighty years.”

  “Oh God, Goethe. I thought you’d get to him.”

  “Yes, Goethe. Worth a regiment of your theologians.”

  It was hopeless to argue with Hugh. The Celtic spirit raged in him, when his pipe was drawing well. If he had a god – a male god – it was certainly Ogma, the Celtic god of eloquence. To the Celts speech, not silence, was golden.

  With such a man argument was futile, for he had a fine command of irrelevance and irrationality, and out of it, I must say, came a splendid wildness of theological speculation, where all beliefs had their own validity, to say nothing of their own absurdity. It was refreshing to be reminded that one’s range of intellect was so trivial, in the face of great mysteries.

  (10)

  WHERE ARE THE great mysteries? I appear to be stranded in a state of nothingness, in which no hints reach me of anything to come. Feelings I certainly have. Emotions, perhaps I should say. I feel a humorous
relish for what I can still observe of the world from which I have been untimely ripped. Esme has already written a couple of good articles telling her readers how she copes with bereavement, and I know that now she is thinking about enlarging on this theme, and writing a how- to book for widows. What do I feel about that? My affection for Esme is not precisely waning, but it is changing, and her brisk opportunism is beginning to grate. As for Allard Going, though it amuses me to see how miserable he is, and to follow the tortuous arguments by which he attempts to convince himself that he is not really a murderer, but an ill-used toy of circumstances, I despise him, hate him, and am determined, if I can manage it, to do him some notable harm.

  He has robbed me, in the most grievous way. He has robbed me of a possible thirty years of life. I never, while living, thought of my life expectancy in quite this possessive fashion. But now I am obsessed by thoughts of Hugh McWearie’s admonitory picture.

  It hangs over his desk, and at the top it is plainly labelled Degrés des ges. I gather that it was a picture familiar enough in simple homes in France, but not often seen in the New World.

  It is a picture, a print, of the journey of life. Over a curved bridge marches Mankind, male and female. At the bottom of the bridge, on the left, two infants lie in a cradle, heavily swaddled and smiling in carefree innocence. Up the curve of the bridge marches Childhood, Youth, Maturity and then – as the curve begins its descent – the marching couples portray Decay, Old Age, and at last arrive at a couple lying in bed in their hundredth year, again like infants, but now hideously wrinkled and toothless, labelled ge d’imbécilité. Right back to their beginning, indeed, but without that hopeful journey ahead.

  To judge by the dress of these people I should date the picture, or chart, at about 1830; they are depicted in gaudy colours, for this was an example of the art of the people, not a sophisticated composition. The possible fate of the travellers is also represented; a conventional Christian Heaven, presided over by a smiling, embracing, bearded Creator, awaits the good, and for the bad lies a Hell with horned and tailed tormentors; these two possibilities are labelled Jugement Universel. I suppose this thing was intended for simple people to hang over the bed, side by side perhaps with a Plenary Absolution, for which they had laid down good money.

  I used to amuse myself by placing my colleagues on the Advocate according to their time of life, and speculating which of the two opposed fates awaited them. Hugh deplored such facetiousness.

  “It’s verra crude,” he would say, “but not without merit for all of that. Look at it and think about it seriously, if you have a serious bone in your reprobate body.”

  “But I do,” I would say. “Look – there’s the Sniffer, and see how gallantly he is arming that handsome woman at his side. No doubt about it, he’s in L’ge viril.”

  “Aye, aye. And who’s the woman with him? Not his wife, of course. Undoubtedly somebody else’s wife. A fine, sonsy lass. Perhaps she’s really the wife of the man on the next grade, labelled L’ge de maturité. Quite a decent figure of a man, wouldn’t you say? What did you tell me your age was, Gil?”

  “Forty-four,” said I.

  “Ah, well – L’ge de maturité right enough. He looks a bit simple for maturity, though that may just be the crudeness of the drawing. A bit self-satisfied, I would say myself.”

  “That’s because you belong in the next rank,” said I. “L’ge de discrétion. It makes you sour about anybody behind you.”

  He never commented on that, and now I know that he was trying to hint to me that the Sniffer was seen rather too often with Esme. He took her with him to a lot of the plays he attended professionally. My work did not give me as many evenings for the theatre as I should have liked. I never paid much attention to their evenings together.

  A bit simple, I see now. A bit self-satisfied.

  And now, beyond question, I had been hustled out of life before my time. The Sniffer had robbed me of a possible thirty or forty years. Without being one of those rapturous creatures who declare that they love life, I certainly enjoyed it deeply, if perhaps a little dully, and did not want to miss a day of what I felt to be my due. Fool! That was my life and my marriage, which Going – and I suppose Esme cannot be wholly exempted from complicity – had invaded cynically and trivially.

  Fool! And because I now see myself to have acted like a fool, I do not hate Going any the less. More, indeed.

  (11)

  HUGH AND I often talked about marriage, and I teased him about his single state.

  “If a man aspires to the condition of a philosopher, and I do that, with proper humility,” he said, “he knows that philosophers are either unmarried, or their wives are slaves or tyrants. I could not reduce any woman to slavery, because that would be unworthy of an enlightened man, and I certainly have no wish to live with a tyrant. We exist in a time that is supposed to be cynical about marriage. Popular prophets predict that it cannot last long as a social institution. But I respect marriage too much to trifle with it. Also, I fear my own Woman, who would probably betray me.”

  “What woman are you talking about?” said I. “Have you been hiding some Highland beauty from us, Hugh? Tell all. Who is this mistress you hint at?”

  “No, no; you don’t understand. Listen to me. Every marriage involves not two, but four people. There are the two that are seen before the altar, or the city clerk, or whoever links them, but they are attended invisibly by two others, and those invisible ones may prove very soon to be of equal or even greater importance. There is the Woman who is concealed in the Man, and there is the Man who is concealed in the Woman. That’s the marriage quaternity, and anybody who fails to understand it must be very simple, or bound for trouble.”

  “Is this some of your Oriental philosophy?”

  “The farthest thing from it. It’s not fanciful, it’s physiological. Even you must know that every man contains a fair number of female genes, and every woman has her masculine genes in some proportion or other – probably quite substantial. Is it fanciful to think that those genes, those numerically fewer but not necessarily inferior elements, never assert themselves?”

  “Oh, come on Hugh! You’re pushing it too far!”

  “I’m doing nothing of the sort. You’re a man of some discernment. Do you have no hours when you find yourself unexpectedly intuitive or forbearing with Esme, or maybe in a quarrel you become a wee bit hysterical and bitchy – which is the negative aspect of that same wisdom and mercy? And Esme, now – consider her substantial career. Do you honestly think she has never had to call on powers that carried her over a rough patch, and gave her strength to bear what she thought she might not be able to endure? Or – I don’t want to intrude on your marriage – but are there never times when she seems simply coarse and domineering? Think, man, and think clearly. If your marriage has not made you aware of those other people who live with you and Esme – with you and in you – you’re asking me to think it’s a far more primitive affair than I am ready to believe.”

  “What did you mean by saying you feared your own Woman?”

  “I have a disposition toward tenderness within me that could make me a slave, if the condition favoured that. Or it might make me a snarling, ugly devil, whose home was a hell. That’s what feminine feeling does in a man, when it goes sour. I’ve never met a woman who would have me whom I felt I could trust in the same house and the same bed with my own Woman.”

  “You make marriage sound even more difficult than the popular marriage counsellors.”

  “Of course it’s difficult, you gowk! Too many people trust to love, which is the worst of guides. Marriage is no game for simpletons. Love’s just the joker in the pack.”

  (12)

  IS THERE ANY point in remembering these talks with Hugh now? Yes, there is, though it is uncomfortable to recall how lightly I took them, simply as amusements to refresh me during my work of reading endless copy written by critics and commentators, most of whom seemed to me to be wide of their mark.
br />   I remember so much. Indeed I remember with greater clarity than when I was alive. I remember now something that Hugh McWearie once dredged up from his apparently inexhaustible reading about matters of the spirit, and of the life after death. In the Bhagavad Gita, said he, it was firmly stated that after death one attains the state that one was thinking about at the moment of death, and so it behoved a man to be careful of what he thought of as he died. As usual, he was diffuse and sometimes incoherent on that point. He talked about Famous Last Words.

  “Which was that English statesman who is said to have died exclaiming, ‘My country! How I leave my country!’ Was it Pitt? Or was it Burke? But somebody else reports that he said, ‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies.’ What was his fate? A splendid brooding over the history of England, or an eternity of veal pie? If there is anything in what the B.G. says, it behoves us to be very careful what we say or even think in our last moments.”

  What I had said at my last moment was an astonished, derisive question to my wife: “My God, Esme, not the Sniffer?” Nothing much there. But an instant beforehand I had been settling a problem incidental to my newspaper work; we were shortly to have a large and important Film Festival in Toronto, and our best film critic had left a month ago to take a job in some university where he was to give courses in film work. (God help them, those wretched students; he knew little enough about anything but the emotions that fuelled his work as a critic.) Who was to write about the most important films that would appear? The Sniffer wanted to do it. He had told me so rather offensively, as if reminding a forgetful child of some obvious obligation. And just as I took that fatal step into my bedroom I had decided that I would have to do what the Sniffer wanted, not because I had any particular faith in his ideas about films, but because there seemed to be no better way of meeting the difficulty. But I was determined to see those films myself.