As he did so his little jaw dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out 'Boo.' No, it wasn't--not a bit dreadful. I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all alone, perhaps two or three--perhaps even four or five--whiskies, so I was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been assailed by a frog. 'Boo!' I said.
'Nonsense. You don't belong to THIS place. What are you doing here?'
"I could see him wince. 'Boo-oo,' he said.
"'Boo--be hanged! Are you a member?' I said; and just to show I didn't care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light my candle. 'Are you a member?' I repeated, looking at him sideways.
"He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became crestfallen. 'No,' he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of my eye; 'I'm not a member--I'm a ghost.'
"'Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there any one you want to see, or anything of that sort?' and doing it as steadily as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness of whisky for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight.
I turned on him, holding it. 'What are you doing here?' I said.
"He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood, abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man.
'I'm haunting,' he said.
"'You haven't any business to,' I said in a quiet voice.
"'I'm a ghost,' he said, as if in defence.
"'That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This is a respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids and children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor little mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits.
I suppose you didn't think of that?'
"'No, sir,' he said, 'I didn't.'
"'You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have you?
Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'
"'None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled--'
"'That's NO excuse.' I regarded him firmly. 'Your coming here is a mistake,' I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly.
'If I were you I wouldn't wait for cock-crow--I'd vanish right away.'
"He looked embarrassed. 'The fact IS, sir--' he began.
"'I'd vanish,' I said, driving it home.
"'The fact is, sir, that--somehow--I can't.'
"'You CAN'T?'
"'No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging about here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come haunting before, and it seems to put me out.'
"'Put you out?'
"'Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't come off.
There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get back.'
"That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the high, hectoring vein I had adopted. 'That's queer,' I said, and as I spoke I fancied I heard some one moving about down below.
'Come into my room and tell me more about it,' I said. 'I didn't, of course, understand this,' and I tried to take him by the arm.
But, of course, you might as well have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my number, I think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms--it was lucky I was the only soul in that wing--until I saw my traps. 'Here we are,' I said, and sat down in the arm-chair; 'sit down and tell me all about it. It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward position, old chap.'
"Well, he said he wouldn't sit down! he'd prefer to flit up and down the room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you know, something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me, and I began to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird business it was that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent--the proper conventional phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of a voice--flitting to and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old bedroom. You could see the gleam of the copper candlesticks through him, and the lights on the brass fender, and the corners of the framed engravings on the wall,--and there he was telling me all about this wretched little life of his that had recently ended on earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you know, but being transparent, of course, he couldn't avoid telling the truth."
"Eh?" said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.
"What?" said Clayton.
"Being transparent--couldn't avoid telling the truth--I don't see it," said Wish.
"_I_ don't see it," said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. "But it IS so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed--he went down into a London basement with a candle to look for a leakage of gas--and described himself as a senior English master in a London private school when that release occurred."
"Poor wretch!" said I.
"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations. 'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.'
Engaged to be married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I suppose--when the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs.
'And where are you now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'
"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue.
