Over the Plum Pudding

You doubtless remember that last summer, with our mutual friend Peters, I travelled abroad seeking health and, incidentally, ideas. I had discovered that imported ideas were on the whole rather more popular in America than those which might be said to be indigenous to the soil. The reading public had, for the time being at least, given itself over to moats and châteaux and bloodshed and the curious dialects of the lower orders of British society. Sherlock Holmes had superseded Old Sleuth in the affections of my countrymen who read books. Even those honest little critics the boys and girls were finding more to delight them in the doings of Richard Cœur de Lion and Alice in Wonderland than in the more remarkable and intensely American adventures of Ragged Dick or Mickie the Motorboy. John Storm was at that moment hanging over the world like the sword of Damocles, and Rudolf Rassendyll had completely overshadowed such essentially American heroes as Uncle Tom and Rollo. I found, to my chagrin, that the poetry of Tennyson was more widely read even than my own, even though Tennyson was dead and I was not. And in the universities whole terms were devoted to the compulsory study of dramatists like Shakespeare and Molière, while home talent, as represented by Mr. Hoyt or the facile productions of Messrs. Weber & Fields, was relegated to the limbo of electives which the students might take up or not, as they chose, and then only in the hours which they were expected to devote to recreation. All of which seemed to indicate that while there was of course no royal road to literary fame, there was with equal certainty no republican path thereto, and that real inspiration was to be derived rather under the effete monarchies of Europe than at home. To Peters the same idea had occurred, but in his case in relation to art rather than to literature. The patrons of art in America had a marked preference for the works of Meissonier, Corot, Gérôme, Millet – anybody, so long as he was a foreigner, Peters said. The wealthy would pay ten, twenty, a hundred thousand dollars for a Rousseau or a Rosa Bonheur rather than exchange a paltry one hundred dollars for a canvas by Peters, though, as far as Peters was concerned, his canvas was just as well woven, his pigments as carefully mixed, and his application of the one to the other as technically correct as was anything from the foreign brushes.

"You can't take in the full import of a Turner unless you stand a way away from it," said he, "and if you'll only stand far enough away from mine you couldn't tell it from a Meissonier."

And when I jocularly responded to this that I thought a mile was the proper distance, he was offended. We quarrelled, but made up after a while, and in the making up decided upon a little venture into foreign fields together, not only to recuperate, but to see if so be we could discover just where the workers on the other side got that quality which placed them in popular esteem so far ahead of ourselves.

What we discovered along this especial line must form the burden of another story. The main cause of our foreign trip, these discoveries, are but incidental to the theme I have in hand. Our conclusions were important, but they have no place here, and what they were you will have to wait until my work on Abroad versus Home is completed to learn. But what is important to this explanation is the fact that while going through the long passage leading from the Pitti Palace to the Uffizi Gallery at Florence we – or rather I – encountered one of those phantoms which have been among the chief joys and troubles of my life. Peters was too much taken up with his Baedeker to see either ghosts or pictures. Indeed, it used to irritate me that Peters saw so little, but he would do as most American tourists do, and spend all of his time looking for some especial thing he thought he ought to see, and generally missing not only it, but thousands of minor things quite as well worthy of his attention. I don't believe he would have seen the ghost, however, under any circumstances. It requires a specially cultivated eye or digestion, one or the other, to enable one to see ghosts, and Peters's eye is blind to the invisible and his digestion is good.

Why, under the canopy, the vulgar little spectre was haunting a picture-gallery I never knew, unless it was to embarrass the Americans who passed to and fro, for he claimed to be an American spook. I knew he was not a living thing the minute I laid eyes through him. He loomed up before me while I was engaged in chuckling over a particularly bad canvas by somebody whose name I have forgotten, but which was something like Beppo di Contarini. It represented the scene of a grand fête at Venice back in the fifteenth century, and while preserved by the art-lovers of Florence as something worthy, would, I firmly believe, have failed of acceptance even by the catholic taste of the editor of an American Sunday newspaper comic supplement. The thing was crude in its drawing, impossible in its coloring, and absolutely devoid of action. Every gondola on the canal looked as if it were stuck in the mud, and as for the water of the Grand Canal itself, it had all the liquid glory under this artist's touch of calf's-foot jelly, and it amused me intensely to think that these patrons of art, in the most artistic city in the world, should have deemed it worth keeping. However, whatever the merit of the painting, I was annoyed in the midst of my contemplation of it to have thrust into the line of vision a shape – I cannot call it a body because there was no body to it. There were the lineaments of a living person, and a very vulgar living person at that, but the thing was translucent, and as it stepped in between me and the wonderful specimen of Beppo di Somethingorother's art I felt as if a sudden haze had swept over my eyes, blurring the picture until it reminded me of a cheap kind of decalcomania that in my boyhood days had satisfied my yearnings after the truly beautiful.

I made several ineffectual passes with my hands to brush the thing away. I had discovered that with certain classes of ghosts one could be rid of them, just as one may dissipate a cloud of smoke, by swirling one's outstretched paw around in it, and I hoped that I might in this way rid myself of the nuisance now before me. But I was mistaken. He swirled, but failed to dissipate.

"Hum!" said I, straightening up, and addressing the thing with some degree of irritation. "You may know a great deal about art, my friend, but you seem not to have studied manners. Get out of my way."

"Pah!" he ejaculated, turning a particularly nasty pair of green eyes on me. "Who the deuce are you, that you should give me orders?"

"Well," said I, "if I were impulsive of speech and seldom grammatical, I might reply by saying Me, but as a purist, let me tell you, sir, that I'm I, and if you seek to know further and more intimately, I will add that who I am is none of your infernal business."

"Humph!" he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Grammatical or otherwise, you're a coward! You don't dare say who you are, because you are afraid of me. You know I am a spectre, and, like all commonplace people, you are afraid of ghosts."

A hot retort was on my lips, and I was about to tell him my name and address, when it occurred to me that by doing so I might lay myself open to a kind of persecution from which I have suffered from time to time, ghosts are sometimes so hard to lay, so I accomplished what I at the moment thought was my purpose by a bluff.

"Oh, as for that," said I, "my name is So and So, and I live at Number This, That Street, Chicago, Illinois."

Both the name and the address were of course fictitious.

"Very well," said he, calmly, making a note of the address. "My name is Jones. I am the president of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, enjoying a well-earned rest from his labors on his savings from his salary as a walking delegate. You shall hear from me on your return to Chicago through the local chapter, the United Apparitions of Illinois."

"All right," said I, with equal calmness. "If the Illinois spooks are as Illinoisome as you are, I will summon the board of health and have them laid without more ado."

Upon this we parted. That is to say, I walked on to the Uffizi, and he vanished, in something of a rage, it seemed to me.

I thought no more of the matter until a week ago, when, in accordance with an agreement with the principal thereof, I left New York to go to Chicago, to give a talk before a certain young ladies' boarding-school, on the subject of "Muscular Romanticism." This was a lecture I had prepared on a literary topic concerning which I had thought much. I had observed that a great deal of the popularity of certain authors had come from the admiration of young girls – mostly those at boarding-school, and therefore deprived of real manly company – for a kind of literature which, seeming to be manly, did not yet appeal very strongly to men. In certain aspects it seemed strong. It presented heroes who were truly heroic, and who always did the right thing in the right manner. Writers who had more ink than blood to shed, and a greater knowledge of etiquette than of human nature, were making their way into temporary fame by compelling chaps to do things they could not do. I rather like to read of these fellows myself. I am no exception to the rule which makes human beings admire, and very strongly, too, the fellow who poses successfully. Indeed, I admire a poseur who can carry his pose through without disaster to himself, because he has nothing to back him up, and, wanting this, if by his assurance he can make himself a considerable personage he falls short of genius only by lacking it. But this is apart from the story. Whatever the general line of thought in the lecture, I was, as I have said, on my way to Chicago to deliver it before a young ladies' boarding-school. I should have been happy over the prospect, for I have many warm friends in Chicago, there was a moderately large fee ahead, and there is always a charm, as well, in the mere act of standing on a dais before some two or three hundred young girls and having their undivided attention for a brief hour. Yet, despite all this, I was dreadfully depressed. Why, I could not at first surmise. It seemed to me, however, as though some horrid disaster were impending. I experienced all the sensations which make four o'clock in the morning so dreaded an hour to those who suffer from insomnia. My heart would race ahead, thumping like the screw of an ocean greyhound, and then slow down until it seemingly ceased to beat altogether; my hands were alternately dry and hot, and clammy and cold; and then like a flash I knew why, and what it was I feared. It suddenly dawned upon my mind that, by some frightfully unhappy coincidence, the address of Miss Brockton's Academy for Young Ladies, whither I was bound, was precisely the same as that I had given the vulgar little spook at Florence as my own. I had entirely forgotten the incident; and then, as I drew near to the spot whereon I was to have been made to suffer through the machinations of the local chapter of the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, my soul was filled with dread. Had Grand-Master-Spook Jones's threat been merely idle? Had he, even as I had done, dismissed the whole affair as unworthy of any further care, or would he keep his word? – indeed, had he kept his word, and, through his followers in the Amalgamated Brotherhood, made himself obnoxious to the residents of Number This, That Street?

My nervous dread redoubled as I neared Chicago, and it was as much as I could do, when the train reached Kalamazoo, to keep from turning back. And the event showed that I suffered with only too much reason, for, on my arrival at the home of the institution, I found it closed. The door was locked, the shades pulled down, the building the perfect picture of gloom. Miss Brockton, I was informed, was in a lunatic-asylum, and two hundred and eighty-three young girls, ranging from fourteen to twenty years of age, had been returned to their parents, the hair of every mother's daughter of them blanched white as the driven snow. No one knew, my informant said, exactly what had occurred at the academy, but the fact that was plain to all was that, some two weeks previous to my coming, the school had retired at the usual hour one night, in the very zenith of a happy prosperity, and gathered at breakfast the next morning to find itself wrecked, and bearing the outward semblance of a home for indigent old ladies. No one, from Miss Brockton herself to the youngest pupil, could give a coherent account of what had turned them all gray in a single night, and brought the furrows of age to cheeks both old and young, nor could any inducement be held out to any of the pupils to pass another night within those walls. They one and all fled madly back to their homes, and Miss Brockton's attempted explanation was so incredible that, protesting her sanity, she was nevertheless placed under restraint, pending a full investigation of the incident. She had, I was informed, asserted that some sixty ghosts of most terrible aspect had paraded through the house between the hours of midnight and 2 a. m., howling and shrieking and threatening the occupants in a most terrifying fashion. At their head marched a spectre brass-band of twenty-four pieces, grinding out with horrid contortions and grimaces the most awful discords imaginable – discords, indeed, Miss Brockton had said, alongside of which those of the most grossly material German street band in creation became melodies of soothing sweetness. The spectre rabble to the rear bore transparencies, upon which were painted such legends as, "Hail to Jones, our beloved Chief!" "Strike One, Strike All!" and, "Down with Hawkins, the Grinder of Ghosts!" This last caused my heart to sink still lower, for Hawkins was the name I had given the vision at Florence, and I now understood all. It was only too manifest that I was the cause of the undoing of these innocents.

My lie to Jones had brought this disaster upon the Brockton Academy. The dreadfulness of it appalled me, and I turned away, sick at heart, only to find myself face to face with the horrid Jones, grinning like the cad he had proved himself.

"Well, you have done it," I cried, trembling with rage. "I hope you are proud of yourself, venting your spite on an innocent woman and two hundred and eighty-three defenceless girls."

He laughed.

"It was a pretty successful haunt," he said; "and possibly, now that Mrs. Hawkins and your daughters – "

"Who?" I cried. "Mrs. What, and my which?"

"Your wife and children," he replied. "Now that the local chapter has attended to them, maybe you'll apologize to me for your boorish behavior at Florence."

"Those people were nothing to me," said I. "That was a boarding-school you have driven crazy. I was merely coming here to lecture – "

I immediately perceived my mistake. He could now easily discover my identity.

"Oho!" said he, with a broad, grim smile. "Then you lied to me at Florence, and you are not Hawkins, but the man they call the spook Boswell among us?"

"Yes, I am not Hawkins, and I am the other," I retorted. "Make the most of it."

"I thought that was rather a large family of girls for one man to have," rejoined Jones. "But see here – are you going to apologize or not?"

"I am not," I cried. "Never in this world nor in the next, you miserable handful of miasma!"

"Then, sir," said he, firmly, "I shall order a general strike for the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Spooks, and the strike will be on until you do apologize. Hereafter you will have to derive your inspiration from a contemplation of unskilled spooks, and, if I understand matters, you will find some difficulty in raising even these, for there is not one that I know of who doesn't belong to the union."

With that he vanished, and I sadly made my way back to my home. Once at my desk again, I turned my attention to the work I had promised you, and, to my chagrin, discovered that while I had in mind all the ingredients of a successful Christmas story, I could not write it, because Grand-Master-Spirit Jones had kept his word. One and all, my selected group of spooks went out on strike. They absolutely refused to pose unless I apologized to Jones, and by no persuasions, threats, or cajoling have I been able since to make them rise up before me, that I might present them to my readers with that degree of fidelity which I deem essential. My home, which was once a sort of spirit club, is now bare of even a semblance of a ghost worth writing up, and, conjure as I may, I cannot bring them back. The strike is on, and I am its victim. But one miserable little specimen have I discovered since my interview with Jones, and so unskilled is he in the science of spooking that I give you my word he could not make a baby shiver on a dark night with the temperature twenty below zero and the wind howling like a madman without; and as for making hair stand on end, I tried him on a bit of hirsute from the tail of the timidest fawn in the Central Park zoo, and the thing fell over as limp as a strand from the silken locks of the Lorelei.

That, my dear sir, is why I cannot give you the story I have promised. I hope you will understand that the fault is not my own, but is the result of the evil tendency of the times, when the protective principle has reached the ultimate of tyrannous absurdity.

While Jones is at the head of the Amalgamated Brotherhood my case is hopeless, for I shall never apologize, unless he promises to restore to poor Mrs. Brockton and her two hundred and eighty-three pupils their former youthful gayety and prosperity, which, I understand upon inquiry, he is unable to do, since the needed patent reversible spook, who will restore blanched hair to its natural color and return the bloom of youth to furrowed cheeks, has not yet been invented; and I, the only person in the world who might have invented it, am powerless, for while the boycott hangs over my head, as you will see for yourself, I am bereft of the raw material for the conducting of the necessary experiments.