The Water Ghost and Others

"Good! Stand by your colors," said Bronson, with an amused smile.

A week or two later Willis received an invitation from Mr. and Mrs. Bronson to dine with them informally. "I have some very clever friends I want you to meet," she wrote. "So be sure to come."

Willis went. The clever friends were Mr. and Mrs. Barrows; and, to the surprise of Willis, he was received most effusively by the quondam Miss Hollister.

"Why, Mr. Willis," she said, extending her hand to him. "How delightful to see you again!"

"Thank you," said Willis, in some confusion. "I—er—I am sure it is a very pleasant surprise for me. I—er—had no idea—"

"Nor I," returned Mrs. Barrows. "And really I should have been a little embarrassed, I think, had I known you were to be here. I—ha! ha!—it's so very absurd that I almost hesitate to speak of it—but I feel I must. I've treated you very badly."

"Indeed!" said Willis, with a smile. "How, pray?"

"Well, it wasn't my fault really," returned Mrs. Barrows; "but do you remember, a little over a year ago, my riding up-town on a horse-car—a Madison Avenue car—with you?"

"H'm!" said Willis, with an affectation of reflection. "Let me see; ah—yes—I think I do. We were the only ones on board, I believe, and—ah—"

Here Mrs. Barrows laughed outright. "You thought we were the only ones on board, but—we weren't. The car was crowded," she said.

"Then I don't remember it," said Willis. "The only time I ever rode on a horse-car with you to my knowledge was—"

"I know; this was the occasion," interrupted Mrs. Barrows. "You sat in a corner at the rear end of the car when I entered, and I was very much put out with you because it remained for a stranger, whom I had often seen and to whom I had, for reasons unknown even to myself, taken a deep aversion, to offer me his seat, and, what is more, compel me to take it."

"I don't understand," said Willis. "We were alone on the car."

"To your eyes we were, although at the time I did not know it. To my eyes when I boarded it the car was occupied by enough people to fill all the seats. You returned my bow as I entered, but did not offer me your seat. The stranger did, and while I tried to decline it, I was unable to do so. He was a man of about my own age, and he had a most remarkable pair of eyes. There was no resisting them. His offer was a command; and as I rode along and thought of your sitting motionless at the end of the car, compelling me to stand, and being indirectly responsible for my acceptance of courtesies from a total and disagreeable stranger, I became so very indignant with you that I passed you without recognition as soon as I could summon up courage to leave. I could not understand why you, who had seemed to me to be the soul of politeness, should upon this occasion have failed to do not what I should exact from any man, but what I had reason to expect of you."

"But, Mrs. Barrows," remonstrated Willis, "why should I give up a seat to a lady when there were twenty other seats unoccupied on the same car?"

"There is no reason in the world why you should," replied Mrs. Barrows. "But it was not until last winter that I discovered the trick that had been put upon us."

"Ah?" said Willis. "Trick?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Barrows. "It was a trick. The car was empty to your eyes, but crowded to mine with the astral bodies of the members of the Boston Theosophical Society."

"Wha-a-at?" roared Willis.

"It is just as I have said," replied Mrs. Barrows, with a silvery laugh. "They are all great friends of my husband's, and one night last winter he dined them at our house, and who do you suppose walked in first?"

"Madame Blavatsky's ghost?" suggested Willis, with a grin.

"Not quite," returned Mrs. Barrows. "But the horrible stranger of the horse-car; and, do you know, he recalled the whole thing to my mind, assuring me that he and the others had projected their astral bodies over to New York for a week, and had a magnificent time unperceived by all save myself, who was unconsciously psychic, and so able to perceive them in their invisible forms."

"It was a mean trick on me, Mrs. Barrows," said Willis, ruefully, as soon as he had recovered sufficiently from his surprise to speak.

"Oh no," she replied, with a repetition of her charming laugh, which rearoused in Willis's breast all the regrets of a lost cause. "They didn't intend it especially for you, anyhow."

"Well," said Willis, "I think they did. They were friends of your husband's, and they wanted to ruin me."

"Ruin you? And why should the friends of Mr. Barrows have wished to do that?" asked Mrs. Barrows, in astonishment.

"Because," began Willis, slowly and softly—"because they probably knew that from the moment I met you, I—But that is a story with a disagreeable climax, Mrs. Barrows, so I shall not tell it. How do you like Boston?"

THE LITERARY REMAINS OF THOMAS BRAGDON

I was much pained one morning last winter on picking up a copy of the Times to note therein the announcement of the death of my friend Tom Bragdon, from a sudden attack of la grippe. The news stunned me. It was like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky, for I had not even heard that Tom was ill; indeed, we had parted not more than four days previously after a luncheon together, at which it was I who was the object of his sympathy because a severe cold prevented my enjoyment of the whitebait, the fillet, the cigar, and indeed of everything, not even excepting Bragdon's conversation, which upon that occasion should have seemed more than usually enlivening, since he was in one of his most exuberant moods. His last words to me were, "Take care of yourself, Phil! I should hate to have you die, for force of habit is so strong with me that I shall forever continue to lunch with none but you, ordering two portions of everything, which I am sure I could not eat, and how wasteful that would be!" And now he had passed over the threshold into the valley, and I was left to mourn.

I had known Bragdon as a successful commission merchant for some ten or fifteen years, during which period of time we had been more or less intimate, particularly so in the last five years of his life, when we were drawn more closely together; I, attracted by the absolute genuineness of his character, his delightful fancy, and to my mind wonderful originality, for I never knew another like him; he, possibly by the fact that I was one of the very few who could entirely understand him, could sympathize with his peculiarities, which were many, and was always ready to enter into any one of his odd moods, and with quite as much spirit as he himself should display. It was an ideal friendship.

It had been our custom every summer to take what Bragdon called spirit trips together—that is to say, generally in the early spring, Bragdon and I would choose some out-of-the-way corner of the world for exploration; we would each read all the literature that we could find concerning the chosen locality, saturate our minds with the spirit, atmosphere, and history of the place, and then in August, boarding a small schooner-rigged boat belonging to Bragdon, we would cruise about the Long Island Sound or sail up and down the Hudson River for a week, where, tabooing all other subjects, we would tell each other all that we had been able to discover concerning the place we had decided upon for our imaginary visit. In this way we became tolerably familiar with several places of interest which neither of us had ever visited, and which, in my case, financial limitations, and in Bragdon's, lack of time, were likely always to prevent our seeing. As I remember the matter, this plan was Bragdon's own, and its first suggestion by him was received by me with a smile of derision; but the quaintness of the idea in time won me over, and after the first trial, when we made a spirit trip to Beloochistan, I was so fascinated by my experience that I eagerly looked forward to a second in the series, and was always thereafter only too glad to bear my share of the trouble and expense of our annual journeyings. In this manner we had practically circumnavigated this world and one or two of the planets; for, content as we were to visit unseen countries in spirit only, we were never hampered by the ordinary limitations of travel, and where books failed to supply us with information the imagination was called into play. The universe was open to us at the expense of a captain for our sharpie, canned provisions for a week, and a moderate consumption of gray matter in the conjuring up of scenes with which neither ourselves nor others were familiar. The trips were refreshing always, and in the case of our spirit journey through Italy, which at that time neither of us had visited, but which I have since had the good-fortune to see in the fulness of her beauty, I found it to be far more delightful than the reality.

"We'll go in," said Bragdon, when he proposed the Italian tour, "by the St. Gothard route, the description of which I will prepare in detail myself. You can take the lakes, rounding up with Como. I will follow with the trip from Como to Milan, and Milan shall be my care. You can do Verona and Padua; I Venice. Then we can both try our hands at Rome and Naples; in the latter place, to save time, I will take Pompeii, you Capri. Thence we can hark back to Rome, thence to Pisa, Genoa, and Turin, giving a day to Siena and some of the quaint Etruscan towns, passing out by the Mont Cenis route from Turin to Geneva. If you choose you can take a run along the Riviera and visit Monte Carlo. For my own part, though, I'd prefer not to do that, because it brings a sensational element into the trip which I don't particularly care for. You'd have to gamble, and if your imagination is to have full play you ought to lose all your money, contemplate suicide, and all that. I don't think the results would be worth the mental strain you'd have to go through, and I certainly should not enjoy hearing about it. The rest of the trip, though, we can do easily in five days, which will leave us two for fishing, if we feel so disposed. They say the blue-fish are biting like the devil this year."

I regret now that we did not include a stenographer among the necessaries of our spirit trips, for, as I look back upon that Italian tour, it was well worthy of preservation in book form, particularly Bragdon's contributions, which were so delightfully imaginative that I cannot but rejoice that he did not live to visit the scenes of which he so eloquently spoke to me upon that occasion. The reality, I fear, would have been a sore disappointment to him, particularly in relation to Venice, concerning which his notions were vaguely suggestive of an earthly floating paradise.

"Ah, Philip," he said, as we cast anchor one night in a little inlet near Milford, Connecticut, "I shall never forget Venice. This," he added, waving his hand over the silvery surface of the moonlit water—"this reminds me of it. All is so still, so romantic, so beautiful. I arrived late at night, and my first sensations were those of a man who has entered a city of the dead. The bustle, the noise and clatter, of a great city were absent; nothing was there but the massive buildings rising up out of the still, peaceful waters like gigantic tombs, and as my gondolier guided the sombre black craft to which I had confided my safety and that of my valise, gliding in and out along those dark unlit streams, a great wave of melancholy swept over me, and then, passing from the minor streets into the Grand Canal, the melancholy was dispelled by the brilliant scene that met my eyes—great floods of light coming from everywhere, the brilliance of each ray re-enforced by its reflection in the silent river over which I was speeding. It was like a glimpse of paradise, and when I reached my palace I was loath to leave the gondola, for I really felt as though I could glide along in that way through all eternity."

"You lived in a palace in Venice?" I asked, somewhat amused at the magnificence of this imaginary tour.

"Certainly. Why not?" he replied. "I could not bring myself to staying in a hotel, Phil, in Venice. Venice is of a past age, when hotels were not, and to be thoroughly en rapport with my surroundings, I took up my abode in a palace, as I have said. It was on one of the side streets, to be sure, but it was yet a palace, and a beautiful one. And that street! It was a rivulet of beauty, in which could be seen myriads of golden-hued fish at play, which as the gondola passed to and fro would flirt into hiding until the intruder had passed out of sight in the Grand Canal, after which they would come slowly back again to render the silver waters almost golden with their brilliance."

"Weren't you rather extravagant, Tom?" I asked. "Palaces are costly, are they not?"

"Oh no," he replied, with as much gravity as though he had really taken the trip and was imparting information to a seeker after knowledge. "It was not extravagant when you consider that anything in Venice in the way of a habitable house is called a palace, and that there are no servants to be tipped; that your lights, candles all, cost you first price only, and not the profit of the landlord, plus that of the concierge, plus that of the maid, plus several other small but aggravatingly augmentative sums which make your hotel bills seem like highway robbery. No, living in a palace, on the whole, is cheaper than living in a hotel; incidentals are less numerous and not so costly; and then you are so independent. Mine was a particularly handsome structure. I believe I have a picture of it here."

Here Bragdon fumbled in his satchel for a moment, and then dragged forth a small unmounted photograph of a Venetian street scene, and, pointing out an ornate structure at the left of the picture, assured me that that was his palace, though he had forgotten the name of it.

"By-the-way," he said, "let me say parenthetically that I think our foreign trips will have a far greater vraisemblance if we heighten the illusion with a few photographs, don't you? They cost about a quarter apiece at Blank's, in Twenty-third Street."

"A good idea that," I answered, amused at the thoroughness with which Bragdon was "doing" Venice. "We can remember what we haven't seen so very much more easily."

"Yes," Bragdon said, "and besides, they'll keep us from exaggeration."

And then he went on to tell me of his month in Venice; how he chartered a gondola for the whole of his stay there from a handsome romantic Venetian youth, whose name was on a card Tom had had printed for the occasion, reading:

GIUSEPPE ZOCCO

Gondolas at all Hours

Cor. Grand Canal and Garibaldi St

"Giuseppe was a character," Bragdon said. "One of the remnants of a by-gone age. He could sing like a bird, and at night he used to bring his friends around to the front of my palace and hitch up to one of the piles that were driven beside my doorstep, and there they'd sing their soft Italian melodies for me by the hour. It was better than Italian opera, and only cost me ten dollars for the whole season."

"And did this Giuseppe speak English, Tom?" I queried, "or did you speak Italian? I am curious to know how you got on together in a conversational sense."

"That is a point, my dear Phil," Bragdon replied, "that I have never decided. I have looked at it from every point of view, and it has baffled me. I have asked myself the question, which would be the more likely, that Giuseppe should speak English, or that I should speak Italian? It has seemed to me that the latter would be the better way, for, all things considered, an American produce-broker is more likely to be familiar with the Italian tongue than a Venetian gondola-driver with the English. On the other hand, we want our accounts of these trips to seem truthful, and you know that I am not familiar with Italian, and we do not either of us know that a possible Zocco would not be a fluent speaker of English. To be honest with you, I will say that I had hoped you would not ask the question."

"Well," I answered, "I'll withdraw it. As this is only a spirit trip we can each decide the point as it seems best to us."