He did not seem to have noticed it particularly till then. “Hullo!” he said, looking at it with some curiosity, “what d’ye call that thing?”
“I call it a beastly nuisance!” I said. “Ever since—since I last saw you, it’s been following me about everywhere in a—in a very annoying manner!”
Will it be believed that the unfeeling brute only chuckled at this? “I don’t know anything about it,” he said, “but all I can say is that it serves you jolly well right, and I hope it will go on annoying you.”
“This is ungenerous,” I said, determined to appeal to any better feelings he might have; “we did not part on—on the best of terms perhaps—”
“Considering that you kicked me over a precipice when I wasn’t looking,” he retorted brutally, “we may take that as admitted.”
“But, at all events,” I argued, “it is ridiculous to cherish an old grudge all this time; you must see the absurdity of it yourself.”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
I determined to make a last effort to move him. “It is Christmas Eve, Barnjum,” I said earnestly, “Christmas Eve. Think of it. At this hour, thousands of throbbing human hearts are speeding the cheap but genial Christmas card to such of their relations as they consider at all likely to respond with a turkey. The costermonger, imaginative for the nonce, is investing damaged evergreens with a purely fictitious value, and the cheery publican is sending the member of his village goose-club back to his cottage home, rich in the possession of a shot-distended bird and a bottle of poisonous port. Hear my appeal. If I was hasty with you, I have been punished. That detestable thing on the hearthrug there has dogged my path to misery and ruin; you cannot be without some responsibility for its conduct. I ask you now, as a man—nay, as an individual—to call it off. You can do it well enough if you only choose; you know you can.”
But Barnjum wouldn’t; he only looked at his own wraith with a grim satisfaction as it capered in an imbecile fashion upon the rug.
“Do,” I implored him; “I would do it for you, Barnjum. I’ve had it about me for six months, and I am so sick of it.”
Still he hesitated. Some waits outside were playing one of those pathetic American melodies—I forget now whether it was “Silver Threads among the Gold,” or “In the Sweet By-and-By”—but, at all events, they struck some sympathetic chord in Barnjum’s rough bosom, for his face began to twitch, and presently he burst unexpectedly into tears.
“You don’t deserve it,” he said between his sobs, “but be it so”; then, turning to the ghost, he added: “Here, you, what’s your name? avaunt! D’ye hear, hook it!”
It wavered for an instant, and then, to my joy, it suddenly “gave” all over, and, shrivelling up into a sort of cobweb, was drawn by the draught into the fireplace, and carried up the chimney, and I never saw it again.
* * * *
Barnjum’s escape was very simple; he had fallen upon one of the herring-boats in the lake, and the heap of freshly-caught fish lying on the deck had merely broken his fall instead of his neck. As soon as he had recovered from the effects, he was called away from this country upon urgent business, and found himself unable to return for months.
But to this day the appearance of the wraith is a mystery to me. If Barnjum had been the kind of man to be an “esoteric Buddhist,” it might be accounted for as an “astral shape”; but esoteric Buddhism requires an exemplary character and years of abstract meditation—both of which conditions were far beyond Barnjum’s attainment.
The shape may have been one of those subtle emanations which we are told some people are constantly shedding, like the coats of an onion, and which certain conditions of the atmosphere, and the extreme activity of Barnjum’s mind under sudden excitement, possibly contributed to materialise in this particular instance.
Or, perhaps, it was merely a caprice of one of those vagrant Poltergeists, or supernatural buffoons, which took upon itself, very officiously, the duty of avenging my behaviour to Barnjum.
Upon one point I am clear: the whole of this system of deliberate persecution being undertaken directly on Barnjum’s account, he is morally and legally bound to reimburse me for the heavy expense and damage which have resulted therefrom.
Hitherto I have been unable to impress Barnjum with this principle, and so my wrongs are still without redress.
I may be asked why I do not make them the basis of an action at law; but persons of any refinement will understand my reluctance to resort to legal proceedings against one with whom I have at least lived on a footing of friendship. I would fain persuade, and shrink from appealing to force; and, besides, I have not succeeded as yet in persuading any solicitor—even a shady one—to take up my case.
THE JOLLY CORNER, by Henry James
CHAPTER I
“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” He was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty years—thirty-three, to be exact; and they now seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that licence. He had been twenty-three on leaving New York—he was fifty-six today; unless indeed he were to reckon as he had sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better or the worse, that at present assaulted his vision wherever he looked.
The great fact all the while, however, had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upside-down; the ugly things he had expected, the ugly things of his far-away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the ugly—these uncanny phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the “swagger” things, the modern, the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn’t a certain finer truth saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had nothing to do. He had come—putting the thing pompously—to look at his “property,” which he had thus for a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described it—the one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his