Short Fiction - H. G. Wells (funny books to read .TXT) 📗

Cummins for some professional pseudonym, complete my self-effacement, and⁠—a thing of tricks and tatters, of posing and pretence⁠—go upon the stage. It seems my only resort⁠—“to hold the mirror up to Nature.” For in the ordinary life, I will confess, no one now seems to regard me as both sane and sober. Only upon the stage, I feel convinced, will people take me seriously. That will be the end of it. I know that will be the end of it. And yet⁠ ⁠… I will frankly confess⁠ ⁠… all that marks off your actor from your common man⁠ ⁠… I detest. I am still largely of my Aunt Charlotte’s opinion, that playacting is unworthy of a pure-minded man’s attention, much more participation. Even now I would resign my dramatic criticism and try a rest. Only I can’t get hold of Barnaby. Letters of resignation he never notices. He says it is against the etiquette of journalism to write to your Editor. And when I go to see him, he gives me another big cigar and some strong whisky and soda, and then something always turns up to prevent my explanation. The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost

The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time, in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name. There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight⁠—which indeed gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying⁠—of that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began, it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought was only the incurable artifice of the man.

“I say!” he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, “you know I was alone here last night?”

“Except for the domestics,” said Wish.

“Who sleep in the other wing,” said Clayton. “Yes. Well⁠—” He pulled at his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about his confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, “I caught a ghost!”

“Caught a ghost, did you?” said Sanderson. “Where is it?”

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in America, shouted, “Caught a ghost, did you, Clayton? I’m glad of it! Tell us all about it right now.”

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. “There’s no eavesdropping of course, but we don’t want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of ghosts in the place. There’s too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle with that. And this, you know, wasn’t a regular ghost. I don’t think it will come again⁠—ever.”

“You mean to say you didn’t keep it?” said Sanderson.

“I hadn’t the heart to,” said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. “I know,” he said, with the flicker of a smile, “but the fact is it really was a ghost, and I’m as sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I’m not joking. I mean what I say.”

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. “It is the strangest thing that has ever happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or anything of the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one in a corner; and the whole business is in my hands.”

He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce a second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

“You talked to it?” asked Wish.

“For the space, probably, of an hour.”

“Chatty?” I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

“The poor devil was in trouble,” said Clayton, bowed over his cigar-end and with the very faintest note of reproof.

“Sobbing?” someone asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. “Good Lord!” he said; “yes.” And then, “Poor fellow! yes.”

“Where did you strike it?” asked Evans, in his best American accent.

“I never realised,” said Clayton, ignoring him, “the poor sort of thing a ghost might be,” and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.

“I took an advantage,” he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. “A character,” he said, “remains just the same character for all that it’s been disembodied. That’s a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose⁠—most haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea’d as monomaniacs and as obstinate as mules to come back again and again. This poor creature wasn’t.” He suddenly looked up rather queerly, and his eye went round the room. “I say it,” he said, “in all kindliness, but that is the plain truth of the case. Even at the first glance he struck me as weak.”

He punctuated with the help of his cigar.

“I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer of the little window at the end. And not only his physique but his attitude struck me as being weak. He looked,