"But I want them for a _month_," I expostulated.
The landlady was firm; she could not disappoint these people after promising to take them in.
In spite of my disappointment, I admired her so much for this strict sense of honour that I determined to look at the rooms in case of requiring any at a future date.
We went upstairs. The rooms were exactly what I required, and very clean and well furnished, so it ended by my agreeing to take them for a week later, although at a considerable inconvenience.
It was in this casual way that I entered the house about the middle of May 1896. My friend was not able to join me until the morning after my arrival, so I spent the first evening alone, and retired to bed rather early. I slept well enough during the earlier part of the night, but awoke about two A.M., having had a tiresome, worrying dream about the very man I have mentioned, who had certainly not been in my thoughts for many months, or possibly years.
Even when fully awake, his influence was still in the room with me, and falling asleep again, there he was once more in my dream, twitting me with my want of appreciation of him in the past, and suggesting what a much more successful career I might have had through marrying him. This sort of thing went on for the rest of the night. Either I woke up with a disagreeable start, still feeling the man"s influence in the room, or sank into a troubled sleep, to be once more at the mercy of his reproaches!
When morning came I was only too thankful to get up, and when my friend arrived on her bicycle about noon, and asked me how I had slept in the strange house, I was forced to confess that my night had been much troubled by dreams about an old friend, of whom she had never heard, by-the-by.
"Oh, well, we all dream about old friends sometimes," she said, "but I"m afraid in this case your dreams were not pleasant; you look tired out!
Anyway, it is a mercy that it was not F----"s!"
And so with a joke the matter dropped.
But the following night the trouble was renewed. Even then I did not in any way connect it with the room in which I was sleeping, and I said nothing next day to my friend on the subject.
But the _third_ night matters had gone beyond a joke. The influence was stronger than ever, the gibes and reproaches more accentuated, and, in addition to these, there was on my side the exasperation engendered by three sleepless nights.
Instead of feeling depressed--as on the two previous occasions--the "worm turned" at last!
I spoke out loud in my vexation, as though the man himself were there listening to me.
"Well," I said, "I have no unkindly feeling towards _you_ of any kind.
If you have nothing better to do than to come worrying me and keeping me awake in this way, it just shows how wise I was _not_ to marry you! You have nothing to do with my life now. And YOU CAN GO."
"Standing up" in this way to the ghost of the living had a most excellent effect, upon my mind at anyrate. I felt intensely relieved, and soon fell into a long and dreamless sleep.
This last experience first suggested the idea that this old friend _must have some special connection with that house_. In the morning I confessed to my friend that my second night had been as disturbed as the first, and the last the worst of all, adding: "That man is simply haunting the place. I am determined to try and find out if he ever lodged here."
This was by no means easy, as it turned out. His College career was already buried in the snows of some twenty-five years. Moreover, when I questioned the young daughter of our landlady as to how long her parents had lived in the house, she said at once: "Just seventeen years, ma"am.
Father and mother came here the year I was born."
This did not help me much. I asked who had rented the house previously.
Referring this question to her mother, she told me it had been taken from some people who had left Cambridge, and "_Mother thought they were both dead now_."
This was a second _cul-de-sac_ for me!
But I was determined to go on with my investigations, simply grounded upon the strong conviction that such repeated experiences _must_ have some foundation in fact.
The girl saw I looked disappointed. "Did you want to know about anyone who lived here long ago?" she ventured timidly.
"Yes; I wanted to find out whether an old friend of mine ever lodged here; he belonged to Peterhouse," was my answer.
"Ah, then, I am sure he would not have lodged here," said the girl confidently. "None of the Peterhouse gentlemen come here. It is always the Pembroke men who come to this house."
It seemed fated that I should hear no more about my living ghost.
A few days later, however, the luck turned.
I was told quite casually that Mr Pound, the well-known Cambridge chemist, had occupied our house years before, and I determined to verify this some day. As Mr Pound combined the post office with his drugs, one often went into the shop, but hitherto I had only seen his a.s.sistants.
Going in one day with my friend for some stamps, Mr Pound himself handed them to me.
Here was my chance! I must confess that I hesitated to ask such an apparently absurd question on such slender grounds. In any case, was it likely that he would remember the names of all the undergraduates in the University who might have lodged with him twenty or thirty years before? I whispered to my friend: "Shall I ask him?" but she did not hear, so even this small encouragement was denied me. I was actually turning to leave the shop, when resolution at length took the reins, and I found myself asking:
"Is it true, Mr Pound, that you lived many years ago at No. -- Trumpington Street?"
"Quite true," was the ready answer. "I went there in the year fifty-five." (I quote this from memory, but it was in the fifties certainly.)
"I wanted to ask a question about a gentleman who may have lodged with you a good deal later than that--about seventy, I should think." And I mentioned the name of my friend.
Mr Pound"s brow cleared at once, and he looked up with a beaming smile.
"Mr Forbes," he said--"why, of course, I remember him well. He lodged with me over eighteen months." Then turning to his a.s.sistant, he told him to go into the parlour and bring out the large photograph alb.u.m.
There was my friend, sure enough, with his big dog--the very photograph I had of him, given me in the early days of our acquaintance.
Mr Pound was full of reminiscences. My friend had evidently been a prime favourite with him, and it was some minutes before I could squeeze in my crucial question. It seemed almost impossible to expect him to remember the exact rooms occupied by Mr Forbes, considering there were two or three "sets" of rooms in the house, in addition to several bedrooms which were let separately.
But even here Mr Pound"s memory proved invaluable. "Which room he slept in? Why, of course, I remember distinctly. He had the large front sitting-room and the bedroom at the back of it; over our living-room in those days."
So I was living in Mr Forbes" sitting-room, and sleeping in the bedroom, he had occupied for more than eighteen months.
My Cambridgeshire friend was, fortunately, present as a witness that no word of mine had indicated this fact before Mr Pound corroborated my intuitive impression. She said afterwards, laughingly, that Mr Myers would certainly think I had got up a special ghost story for him the moment I set foot in Cambridge.
However this may be, both he and Professor Sidgwick were greatly interested in it, for, as they explained, there were fifty accounts of haunting by the dead to one such example of haunting by the living.
Of course, such a case presents innumerable difficulties; still the salient fact remains, that after a lapse of nearly thirty years I traced the rooms occupied by an old friend, in a city I had never before entered, and that this knowledge did not come to me by chance, but _as the result of a series of investigations, started by me solely on account of the experiences that came to me in a house and in a room of which I had absolutely no previous knowledge_. Those interested in these subjects will naturally ask: "_Do you suppose that the spirit of Mr Forbes came to you at the moment of your remarks to him and his to you?
If so, was he conscious of any such experience?_"
I can answer this last question decidedly, and in the negative; for four years later, circ.u.mstances brought me once more within the orbit of Mr Forbes" life. He was then living in the north of England, and he and his wife and I have discussed the question more than once.
We can only suppose that the impression of his presence did in some way cling to the surroundings; that my sleeping there, even in complete ignorance of his tenancy, enabled me, as a "sensitive," to pick up this special influence from many others presumably present; and that the memories of the past galvanised the impression into some sort of temporary astral existence. The ent.i.ty to whom I seemed to be speaking was doubtless _not_ the Judge Forbes of later life, but some distorted image of his earlier days of disappointed and often reproachful affection.
When Mr Myers suggested that I should get Mr Pound to sign a paper mentioning that he had told me that Mr Forbes had occupied these special rooms twenty-seven years previously, the latter did so readily, only remarking that he had naturally concluded that I _knew_ my friend had lodged with him.
"Pound will "smell a rat" if I go," said Mr Myers.
So I went myself, and thus the story was made evidentially complete.
CHAPTER X
FURTHER EXPERIENCES IN AMERICA