""Come along with me," said I, "and I will show you just what you want to know."
"Then taking him by the hand I led him across the room to the seat I had just left; but though the sages who were present saw him cross the room, not one of them saw me, who was leading him by the hand.
"I took out a sheet of paper and began to draw figures and work formulae, the boy meanwhile standing by the side of my chair and saying not a word. When I had finished I said:
""Do you understand?"
""Perfectly," he answered; "I see it at last. Thank you ever so much."
""Now Billy," I said, "there is something you can do for _me_. I want you to stand on that chair and tell the people that the person they are making the fuss about is named Panhandle, that you know him, that he is real and quite harmless, and that he hopes they won"t shoot at him any more, because it hurts. Say you are _quite certain_ he is real, because he has just told you how the planets are weighed."
""Dear Pan," said Billy, "don"t ask me to do that. I never tell people about _you_; they would only laugh at me if I did. Let us keep just as we are, old fellow, and not tell our secret to anybody."
"Unprepared for a style of address so familiar, "Why, Billy," I said, "I have never seen you before."
""Are you quite sure you see me _now_?" he replied.
"Our positions had become reversed--Billy sitting in my study chair that he might read over what I had written about the planets, I standing by his side. I looked down to answer his last question, and for the briefest fraction of a second a vision pa.s.sed before me. The object beneath me was not my study chair, but a small iron bedstead on which there lay a boy, fast asleep. It pa.s.sed in the twinkling of an eye, and I found myself seated as before at my desk; the half-finished report was before me, and, save myself, not a soul was in the room. "It is certain," thought I, "that I am haunting somebody. In the name of all the secret Powers that guide the fates of men--whom am I haunting?""
"A marvellous story," I cried; "and more significant than even you, Panhandle, are aware. I knew Billy Burst. He and I were schoolmates, and practised magic together under the guidance of a mysterious Power whose name Billy would never disclose."
"You knew Billy Burst!" exclaimed Panhandle. "My friend, you fill me with astonishment and delight. Did I not say we were on the eve of great discoveries? Tell me all you know about Billy, for the matter is of the utmost importance."
"You are making _me_ wait for the appearance of the ghost," said I, "and must not be aggrieved if I make _you_ wait for information about Billy."
"I again pledge my word to you," he answered, "that you shall see a ghost this very night."
"And I pledge mine to you that you shall hear all about Billy as soon as the ghost appears. But it is my turn first."
"Let us make it a covenant," he said.
"Agreed!" I answered.
"Then shake hands over the bargain."
As he said this he stood up and extended his hand.
With the utmost eagerness I sprang to my feet and made the reciprocating gesture. For an instant I thought that excitement had unsteadied me, for my hand, seeking his, seemed to move at random in the vacant air. Then I made a second attempt, carefully noting the position of his extended palm, and this time the truth dawned upon me in a flash. My hand, indeed, grasped what seemed to be his. But there was no substance to resist my closing fingers, no hardness of interior bones, no softness of enveloping tissues, no pressure, no contact, no warmth.
"Panhandle," I cried, "you are a ghost!"
"Hush!" he answered; "we never use that term in addressing one another.
Whatever I _am_, you are also in process of _becoming_. You have been slow in making the discovery. I thought you had found me out when we stood among the cypress in the garden."
I was trembling all over and had no control over the next words that came to my tongue. What they were I cannot remember, but Panhandle"s reply seems to indicate that I had been imploring him to tell me what kind of a ghost he was.
"Certainly not a character taken out of a novel," he was saying. "Think of the other orders of spirits who I told you were haunting the house, and place me in the last and highest."
"You are the ghost of a philosophy!" I said.
"I am."
"Whose philosophy are you?" I shouted, for the figure of Panhandle was rapidly sliding away into the distance.
"Your own!" was the answer.
"Come back, beloved Panhandle!" I called after the retreating figure.
"Come back and let me fulfil my part of the compact before you go. I have yet to tell you the story of Billy Burst."
"I shall read it in the next chapter of your book," was the reply, now almost inaudible, so great was the distance from which it came.
I called yet louder, "I have a ghost-story to tell _you_, dear Panhandle. Very important. About the ghost of a novelist. Far better than yours about the novelist"s characters!"
"I shall read about that in the next chapter but one."
Such, I am fain to believe, was the answer. But the voice had now become so faint that this rendering of the words is given with reserve. My first impression was that Panhandle said simply, "Pooh, pooh!"
I was determined not to let him go. Raising my voice to the uttermost, I continued to call him. "Come back," I kept shouting, "and arm me with one more word of wisdom for the battle of life! Without you, Panhandle, I have no protector, and the psychologists will surely devour me."
At the sound of the word "psychologists" Panhandle"s flight was suddenly arrested. In one swoop he retraversed the vast s.p.a.ce that now lay between us, and returned to his original position.
"Hear, then, my last word," he said. "The chief errors of mankind issue from the notion that thinking is a solitary process and the thinker an isolated being. In writing their works or monologues the thinkers, with few exceptions, have mistaken the form which is proper to philosophy and thereby done violence to the true nature of thought. All thinking is the work of a community; its form is conversational and, in the highest stages, dramatic. For want of this knowledge many philosophers have gone astray. Ignorant of the other minds with which their own are in communion, deaf to the voices which mingle with theirs in the eternal dialogue of thought, they have uttered their message as a weary monologue, and the vivid interplay of mind with mind, the quick debate of reacting spirits, which is the very life of thought, has fallen dead.
In the course of your education, which has properly begun to-day, you will become acquainted with a mult.i.tude of interlocutors whose existence you have never suspected, though they have been addressing you from the first moment you began to think and contributing much of what you consider most original in your thought. These are the ghosts by whom you will henceforth be haunted, until, finally, they make you one of themselves and carry you to heaven in a whirlwind of fire. Farewell."
Having said this, he instantly vanished, leaving behind him a faint odour of Havana cigars.
At the same moment a marvellous change, the stages of which have left no record on my memory, pa.s.sed over me. I found myself in the place where I am at this moment, this identical sheet of paper was under my hand, this pen was writing, and the ink of the last paragraph was still wet.
THE MAGIC FORMULA
I
Many years ago I had a schoolfellow and bosom friend whom I knew as Billy, but whose name as it stood in the Register was William Xavier Plosive. Where his family came from, or where they got their outlandish name, I know not. From its rarity I infer that the Plosive stock has not multiplied lavishly on the earth. Only twice, since the days of my friendship with Billy, have I encountered that name. There is, or was, a wayside public-house in Devonshire, the landlord of which was a Plosive; it bore the sign of the "Dog and Ladle," which the signboard interpreted by a picture of a large retriever in precipitate flight with a tin ladle tied to his tail. The other Plosive of my acquaintance kept a shop in a Canadian city; he was a French half-breed, and, as I have heard, a great rascal.
Billy"s father was said to have been a Roman Catholic; and I infer from the name he bestowed on his son that he had a turn for waggishness of a sort. Plosive senior must have foreseen what would happen. No sooner, of course, was the name William X. Plosive seen on the outside of the poor boy"s copy-books than a whisper pa.s.sed through the whole school--"Billy Burst." And that name remained with him to the end. It was more appropriate than its bestowers knew.
"_When_ did Billy burst?" "_Why_ did Billy burst?" "Will Billy burst again?" and a hundred questions of the like order were asked all day long apropos of nothing. They were shouted in the playground. They were whispered in the cla.s.s. They broke the silence of the dormitory in the dead of night. With them we relieved our pent-up feelings in hours of tedium or of gloom. Introduced _pianissimo_, they profaned the daily half-hour devoted to the study of Divinity. Innumerable impositions followed in their train. One morning the Rev. Cyril Puttock, M.A., who "took" us in Divinity, saw written large on the blackboard in front of him these words: "What burst Billy?" I spent my next half-holiday in writing out the Beat.i.tudes a hundred times.
Billy and I slept in the same dormitory and our beds were side by side.
Both of us were bad sleepers, and many a deep affinity did our souls discover in the silent watches of the night. As a place to observe the workings of telepathy I know of no spot on earth to compare with the dormitory of a boarding-school. The atmosphere of our dormitory was, if I may say so, in a state of chronic telepathic saturation, and the area where the currents ran strongest was in the s.p.a.ce between Billy"s bed and mine. This is the sort of thing that would go on:
"Billy, are you awake?"