The Water Ghost and Others

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 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."

"I think that is the proper plan," he said, and then, proceeding with his story, he described to me the marvellous paintings that adorned the walls of his palace; how he had tried to propel a gondola himself, and got a fall into the "deliciously tepid waters of the canal," as he called them, for his pains; and it seemed very real, so minute were the details into which he entered.

But the height of Bragdon's realism in telling his story of Venice was reached when, diving down into the innermost recesses of his vest pocket, he brought forth a silver filigree effigy of a gondola, which he handed me with the statement that it was for me.

"I got that in the plaza of St. Marc's. I had visited the cathedral, inspected the mosaic flooring, taken a run to the top of the campanile, fed the pigeons, and was just about returning to the palace, when I thought of you, Phil, getting ready to do Rome with me, and I thought to myself 'what a dear fellow he is!' and, as I thought that, it occurred to me that I'd like you to know I had you in mind at the time, and so I stopped in one of those brilliant little shops on the plaza, where they keep everything they have in the windows, and bought that. It isn't much, old fellow, but it's for remembrance' sake."

I took it from him and pressed his hand affectionately, and for a moment, as the little sharpie rose and fell with the rising and falling of the slight undulating waves made by the passing up to anchorage of a small steam-tug, I almost believed that Tom had been to Venice. I still treasure the little filigree gondola, nor did I, when some years later I visited Venice, see there anything for which I would have exchanged that sweet token of remembrance.

Bragdon, as will already have been surmised by you who read, was more of a humorist than anything else, but the enthusiasm of his humor, its absolute spontaneity and kindliness, gave it at times a semblance to what might pass for true poetry. He was by disposition a thoroughly sweet spirit, and when I realized that he had gone before, and that the trips he and I had looked forward to with such almost boyish delight year by year were never more to be had, my eyes grew wet, and for a time I was disconsolate; and yet one week later I was laughing heartily at Bragdon.

He had appointed me, it was found when his will was read, his literary executor. I fairly roared with mirth to think of Bragdon's having a literary executor, for, imaginative and humorous as he undoubtedly was, he had been so thoroughly identified in my mind with the produce business that I could scarcely bring myself to think of him in the light of a literary person. Indeed, he had always seemed to me to have an intolerance of literature. I had taken but half of a spirit trip with him when I discovered that he relied more upon his own imagination for facts of interest than upon what could be derived from books. He showed this trait no more strongly than when we came, upon this same Italian tour of which I have already written at some length, to do Rome together, for I then discovered how imaginary indeed the trips were from his point of view. What seemed to him as proper to be was, and neither history nor considerations of locality ever interfered with the things being as he desired them to be. Had it been otherwise he never would have endeavored to make me believe that he had stood upon the very spot in the Colosseum where Caesar addressed the Roman mob in impassioned words, exhorting them to resist the encroachment upon their liberties of the Pope!

At first it seemed to me that my late friend was indulging in a posthumous joke, and I paid his memory the compliment of seeing the point. But when, some days later, I received a note from his executors stating that they had found in the store-room of Bragdon's house a large packing-box full of papers and books, upon the cover of which was tacked a card bearing my address, I began to wonder whether or not, after all, the imagination of my dead friend had really led him to believe that he possessed literary ability.

I immediately sent word to the executors to have the box forwarded to me by express, and awaited its coming with no little interest, and, it must be confessed, with some anxiety; for I am apt to be depressed by the literary lucubrations of those of my friends who, devoid of the literary quality, do yet persist in writing, and for as long a time as I had known Bragdon I had never experienced through him any sensations save those of exhilaration, and I greatly feared a posthumous breaking of the spell. Poet in feeling as I thought him, I could hardly imagine a poem written by my friend, and while I had little doubt that I could live through the reading of a novel or short prose sketch from his pen, I was apprehensive as to the effect of a possible bit of verse.

It seemed to me, in short, that a poem by Bragdon, while it might easily show the poet's fancy, could not fail to show also the produce-broker's clumsiness of touch. His charm was the spontaneity of his spoken words, his enthusiastic personality disarming all criticism; what the labored productions of his fancy might prove to be, I hardly dared think. It was this dread that induced me, upon receipt of the box, appalling in its bulk and unpleasantly suggestive of the departure to other worlds of the original consignor, since it was long and deep like the outer oaken covering of a casket, to delay opening it for some days; but finally I nerved myself up to the duty that had devolved upon me, and opened the box.

It was full to overflowing with printed books in fine bindings, short tales in Bragdon's familiar hand in copy-books, manuscripts almost without number, three Russia-leather record-books containing, the title-page told me, that which I most dreaded to find, The Poems of Thomas Bragdon, and dedicated to "His Dearest Friend"—myself. I had no heart to read beyond the dedication that night, but devoted all my time to getting the contents of the box into my library, having done which I felt it absolutely essential to my happiness to put on my coat, and, though the night was stormy, to rush out into the air. I think I should have suffocated in an open field with those literary remains of Thomas Bragdon heaped about me that night.

On my return I went immediately to bed, feeling by no means in the mood to read The Poems of Thomas Bragdon. I tossed about through the night, sleeping little, and in the morning rose up unrefreshed, and set about the examination of the papers and books intrusted to my care by my departed friend. And oh, the stuff I found there! If I was depressed at starting in, I was stupefied when it was all over, for the collection was mystifying to the point that it stunned.

In the first place, on opening Volume I. of the Poems of Thomas Bragdon, the first thing to greet my eyes were these lines:

As I read I was conscious of having seen the lines somewhere before, and yet I could not place them for the moment. They certainly possessed merit, so much so, in fact, that I marvelled to think of their being Bragdon's. I turned the leaves further and discovered this:

Two stanzas in the poem, the first and the last, reminded me, as did the lines on "Constancy," of something I had read before. In a moment I had placed the first as the opening lines of Longfellow's "Children," and a search through my books showed that the concluding verse was taken bodily from Peacock's exquisite little poem "Castles in the Air."

Despairing to solve the problem that now confronted me, which was, in brief, what Bragdon meant by bodily lifting stanzas from the poets and making them over into mosaics of his own, I turned from the poems and cast my eyes over some of the bound volumes in the box.

The first of these to come to hand was a copy of Hamlet, bound in tree calf, the sole lettering on the book being on the back, as follows:

This I deemed a harmless bit of vanity, and not necessarily misleading, since many collectors of books see fit to have their own names emblazoned on the backs of their literary treasures; but pray imagine my horror upon opening the volume to discover that the name of William Shakespeare had been erased from the title-page, and that of Thomas Bragdon so carefully inserted that except to a practised eye none would ever know that the page was not as it had always been. I must confess to some mirth when I read that title-page:

The conceit was well worthy of my late friend in one of his most fanciful moods. In other volumes the same substitution had been made, so that to one not versed in literature it would have seemed as though "Thomas Bragdon, Esquire," had been the author not only of Hamlet, but also of Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, Rienzi, and many other famous works, and I am not sure but that the great problem concerning the "Junius Letters" was here solved to the satisfaction of Bragdon, if not to my own. There were but two exceptions in the box to the rule of substituting the name of Bragdon for that of the actual author; one of these was an Old Testament, on the fly-leaf of which Bragdon had written, "To my dear friend Bragdon," and signed "The Author." I think I should have laughed for hours over this delightful reminder of my late friend's power of imagination had not the second exception come almost immediately to hand—a copy of Milton, which I recognized at once as one I had sent Tom at Christmas two years before his death, and on the fly-leaf of which I had written, "To Thomas Bragdon, with the love of, his faithfully, Philip Marsden." This was, indeed, a commonplace enough inscription, but it gathered unexpected force when I turned over a leaf and my eyes rested on the title, where Bragdon's love of substitutes had led him to put my name where Milton's had been.